Question

I have some PL/SQL code that I think might have a memory leak. Everytime I run it it seems to run slower and slower than the time before, even though now I am decreasing the input size. The code that I’m suspicious of is populating an array from a cursor using bulk-collect, something like this

    open c_myCursor(in_key);
         fetch c_myCursor bulk collect into io_Array; /*io_array is a parameter, declared as in out nocopy */
    close c_myCursor;

I’m not sure how to check to see what’s causing this slowdown. I know there are some tables in Oracle that track this kind of memory usage, but I’m not sure if it’s possible to look at those tables and find my way back to something useful about what my code is doing.

Also, I tried logging out the session and logging back in after about 10-15 minutes, still very slow.

Oracle version is 10.2

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So it turns out there was other database activity. The DBA decided to run some large insert and update jobs at about the same time I started changing and testing code. I suspected my code was the root cause because I hadn’t been told about the other jobs running (and I only heard about this other job after it completely froze everything and all the other devs got annoyed). That was probably why my code kept getting slower and slower.

Is there a way to find this out programmatically, such as querying for a session inserting/updating lots of data, just in case the DBA forgets to tell me the next time he does this?

Answer 1

v$sessmetric is a quick way to see what resources each session is using – cpu, physical_reads, logical_reads, pga_memory, etc.