ORA-00490

Sometimes all of a sudden our Instance will be crashed and when looked at alert log file we found below error message

ORA-00490: PSP process terminated with error

While PSP process itself terminated due to any error the whole instance is crashed with ORA-00490 error message.

On further check you may found one more error also in the alert log file which describes as

ORA-27300: OS system dependent operation:fork failed with status: 12
ORA-27301: OS failure message: Not enough space
ORA-27302: failure occurred at: skgpspawn3

When operating system is encountering with some unknown error like insufficient space in temp Area or swap Area or insufficient system resources then Oracle throws above errors

Same time PMON is terminating instance with following error with process id of PMON process. Because Oracle processes are being unmanageable of Oracle database instance.

PMON: terminating instance due to error 490
Instance terminated by PMON, pid = 20094 

Cause:

This error will occur when there is no free space available in swap area of System for spawning new process of Oracle. Due to this reason Process SPwaner process PSP0 (with ORA-00490 error code of Oracle) terminated because it doesn’t able to manage or create Oracle processes. Result is Oracle instance crashed by PMON process with errorstack 490 (which is pointing out ORA-00490). If lack of system resource found then also same situation can be occurring.

Solution :

There are 2 solutions for this problem which are mentioned below

1. Check your swap space and increase swap area in system. Because due to lack of space in swap are Oracle unable to create new process and PSP0 Process SPwaner is unable to manage Oracle process.

2. Check “ulimit” setting for Oracle. “ulimit” is for user shell limitation. If maximum shell limit is reached then also PSP0 process becomes unstable to manage other Oracle processes.Increase the “ulimit” setting for Oracle user.

Note : Hope this helps and Please share this post to your friends in case you feel its informative………..