Infrastructure Software

We have installed Oracle10g 10.2.0.2 as a single DB Shared Server Instance, on an underlying ASM instance, with 32GB of memory on an AMD64 Server with RHES4 Update2 and a 4-CPU System. We would like to know what people recommend setting the various Oracle-related memory parameters to, given the 32GB available? We've seen a number of recommendations but not for a 32GB system as yet.

Currently, we have assigned a total of 15GB to the SGA (and PGA: it's a shared server) in following old guidelines about not using more than half of memory to assign to Oracle. But is that optimal? Should we go higher or lower? What should we set 'memlock' to under /etc/security/limits.conf: how much higher than the SGA value should it be assuming a 15GB SGA? What should HugePages be set to? Other memory parameters?

Just as important, what is a good, stable kernel version and release number to run with ES4 and Oracle10g? We are currently using 2.6.9-22.ELsmp and have noticed some weird effects in temporarily 'lost' memory when using certain utilities like 'compress'. Such memory may simply be retained in cache, but additional explanations would be helpful, because we've never seen such memory 'behavior' before, moving over to Linux from Solaris.

Thanks,

Charles Funderburke