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SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE Hangs

SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE

Shutdown immediate may not go smoothly as you thought, it could seem to be stuck in an infinite waiting. If you wait and hope the process monitor to terminate those dead, unresponsive or unstoppable user sessions in a short time, then you need more luck, because something is blocking the way.

In hanging situation, it's probably taking too long time to complete the shutdown. If you can't wait, you can try to cancel it and issue a SHUTDOWN ABORT or kill System Monitor (SMON) or Process Monitor (PMON) instead of SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE.

Although SHUTDOWN ABORT is safer than killing SMON or PMON, they both have some side effects. In this post, I introduce a way to make stuck shutdowns go more smoothly, which is, killing dead user processes at OS-level in one command.

Identify Dead User Processes

Either LOCAL is YES or NO, they are potential candidates to be killed. Additionally, all their process name contain oracle$ORACLE_SID.

[oracle@primary02 ~]$ ps -ef | grep LOCAL | grep oracle$ORACLE_SID
oracle     1369      1 33 15:40 ?        03:03:25 oraclePRIMDB2 (LOCAL=NO)
oracle     2998      1  9 15:44 ?        03:00:36 oraclePRIMDB2 (LOCAL=NO)
oracle     3000      1 11 15:44 ?        03:00:43 oraclePRIMDB2 (LOCAL=NO)
oracle     3153      1  3 15:44 ?        03:00:12 oraclePRIMDB2 (LOCAL=NO)
oracle     3155      1  5 15:44 ?        03:00:18 oraclePRIMDB2 (LOCAL=NO)
oracle     3158      1  5 15:44 ?        03:00:21 oraclePRIMDB2 (LOCAL=NO)
oracle     3160      1  5 15:44 ?        03:00:18 oraclePRIMDB2 (LOCAL=NO)
oracle     3175      1  1 15:44 ?        03:00:07 oraclePRIMDB2 (LOCAL=NO)
oracle     3178      1  3 15:45 ?        03:00:12 oraclePRIMDB2 (LOCAL=NO)
oracle     3188      1  3 15:45 ?        03:00:12 oraclePRIMDB2 (LOCAL=NO)
...

In my case, there're about 64 dead processes to be terminated in node 2 of a cluster database, which prevent SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE.

List Dead User Process ID

I used awk to cut all the process id for later use.

[oracle@primary02 ~]$ ps -ef | grep LOCAL | grep oracle$ORACLE_SID | awk '{print $2}'
1369
2998
3000
3153
3155
3158
3160
3175
3178
3188
...

Kill Dead User Processes

Now, it's time to kill them all in one command.

[oracle@primary02 ~]$ kill -9 $(ps -ef | grep LOCAL | grep oracle$ORACLE_SID | awk '{print $2}')
[oracle@primary02 ~]$ echo $?
0

In the above, we treated all process id as arguments for kill command to terminate. Now we can check the shutdown again.

After an immediate medication, we should go back to the basic question, what would be the possible causes of shutdown stuck? Let's think about it.

In some rare incidents, the instance may decide to shutdown itself in case of further damage to the whole database. We should be aware of that.

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