Hi,
I maintain an internal website which accesses Oracle 8i databases using php 5.1.5 via the ora_* extensions. It's worked without issue for about 6 months, but last week started throwing ORA-1019 errors whenever a database connection was required . The oracle help page for this is:
ORA-01019: unable to allocate memory in the user side
Cause: The user side memory allocator returned error.
Action: Increase the processes heap size or switch to the old set of calls.
On the web server, I can access oracle via SQLPlus or TOAD without a hitch, it's only a problem when php tries it (even if I execute the php code via the command line).
I've increased the heap size from 512k to 3072k (at 512 steps), rebooting the server each time and it's made no difference at all. I've even changed the virtual memory settings from the automatic 1534M to 3072M, again with no improvement.
I'm really struggling to come up with ideas - I've no idea what's changed between it working and it failing last week. I've got a memory monitor showing me that 70% of RAM is free (and cpu generally sits around 10%). Basically I can't even hazard a guess as to why it would complain about heap size - and I can access oracle via everything else, just not PHP all of a sudden .
Any help welcome - as you can imagine 1 week of inexplicable downtime for this area of the website with no progress at all is a bit woesome!
(Before you say it - switching to a newer version of Oracle isn't an option ... and wasn't a problem until last week )