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Asked: 2026-05-11T05:03:45+00:00

What is this thing called a KGL SIMULATOR and how can its memory utilisation

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What is this thing called a KGL SIMULATOR and how can its memory utilisation be managed by application developers?

The background to the question is that I’m occasionally getting errors like the following and would like to get a general understanding of what is using this heap-space?

ORA-04031: unable to allocate 4032 bytes of shared memory (‘shared pool’,’select text from > view$ where…’,’sga heap(3,0)’,’kglsim heap’)

I’ve read forum posts through Google suggesting that the kglsim is related to the KGL SIMULATOR, but there is no definition of that component, or any tips for developers.

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  1. KGL=Kernel General Library cache manager, as the name says it deals with library objects such cursors, cached stored object definitions (PL/SQL stored procs, table definitions etc).

    KGL simulator is used for estimating the benefit of caching if the cache was larger than currently. The general idea is that when flushing out a library cache object, it’s hash value (and few other bits of info) are still kept in the KGL simulator hash table. This stores a history of objects which were in memory but flushed out.

    When loading a library cache object (which means that no existing such object is in library cache), Oracle goes and checks the KGL simulator hash table to see whether an object with matching hash value is in there. If a matching object is found, that means that the required object had been in cache in past, but flushed out due space pressure.

    Using that information of how many library cache object (re)loads could have been been avoided if cache had been bigger (thanks to KGL simulator history) and knowing how much time the object reloads took, Oracle can predict how much response time would have been saved instancewide if shared pool was bigger. This is seen from v$library_cache_advice.

    Anyway, this error was probably raised by a victim session due running out of shared pool space. In other words, someone else may have used up all the memory (or all the large enough chunks) and this allocation for KGL sim failed because of that.

    v$sgastat would be the first point for troubleshooting ORA-4031 errors, you need to identify how much free memory you have in shared pool (and who’s using up most of the memory).

    — Tanel Poder http://blog.tanelpoder.com

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