SNMP.exe - its a bit techy so you can ignore if you want

[bibble]

Ok here's a tricky one. We have two servers in general use for an application we run. Both have SNMP.exe running on them which I gather is a network balancing protocol related to TCPIP.

On the smaller server there is one processor with 256mb of ram and SNMP uses about 3mb. This is used primary to store some applications which are run from there and as a file store.

On the larger one there are 4 xeons with 2gig of memory and is used only for Oracle. SNMP here uses over a gig.

Our supplier says this is way too high but its not an oracle issue. Does anyone here have any ideas on this.

regards


Mike

[Gurm]

Are you USING snmp?

I mean, it's a protocol, for system management and monitoring. If you aren't USING it, disable the service and get your gig back.

- Gurm

[Duty]

Yes, if you are not using it kill it. If you are not sure what it is or what it is for go here...

http://www2.rad.com/networks/1995/snmp/snmp.htm

Jeff

[bibble]

When the server gets rebooted it starts with 1gig from the beginning but never has any processor time from then on. Any idea what it is used for? Do we use it - well to be honest I am not sure (have mailed our network guy but he had the day off - probably in his garden again). I need to increase my number of oracle processes and was told to fix this first.

Just been told it monitors TCP and is probably holding a hex dump in memory - oh well i think i will talk to network bloke on monday

[agallag]

SNMP is Simple Network Management Protocol. It's for monitoring everything about the server. System and application errors, performance stats, etc, not just for TCP/IP. It would normally sent alerts to a central server where you collect the stats, generate reports, etc. It should definitely not under any circumstances use a gig of memory.

Is it a windows server? If so, go into services and go into properties on the snmp service. See if you can see anything weird in there. If it's unix/linux or anything else, I can't help ya.

Edit: considering you said is was snmp.exe, I guess it is windows, eh?

[agallag]

I just took a look at one of our servers that's running SNMP, and I can't see any setting that would cause that kind of memory usage. Our peak memory usage is 5,200K.

Do you have any funky monitoring software loaded on that box? Like management agents from the hardware vendor (Dell OpenManage, Compaq/HP Insight Manager), or third party (OpenView, Tivoli, Unicenter, etc). Some of those applications can interact with the SNMP service in strange ways.

[bibble]

agallag - its our oracle thing and yes its windows. There is a dell raid plugin to mmc as its an 8 disc raid system (one redundant). The other server uses onlt 3 mb as I mentioned but its hardware is not as funky.

[agallag]

Ah Dell. Not surprising, their servers suck donkey. You may want to get their tech support on the phone and ask them what's going on.

First, find out if you're actually sending any SNMP alerts anywhere. If not, uninstall it (add/remove windows components). That should take care of the problem.

[bibble]

I will tell my boss 'dell servers suck donkey' and see what she says LOL

I will speak to Alex (network blokey - on monday). thanks btw

[MultimediaMan]

"Dell Servers Suck Donkey..."

Gee, where I work we have just over 10,000 of them in production (Dinky 1300 Towers on up to 2U 2650s)....less than 20 are down hard at any given time, and they all run Windows of some flavor or another...Since I don't know too much about how things are done on the Home Office Side of things, I've omitted the Home Office Boxes from that figure (we have Several Hundred Dell Servers in our building alone). For the numbers impaired, that's over 99.998% availability based on boxes alone: keeping in mind most of these these are configured for high availability, meaning that they are redundant, we have better than 99.998% availability throughout the chain. They most definitely do not suck donkey.

It's kinda nice to know what temperature the Processors are running at, how hot the HDDs are and so on and so forth when troubleshooting a problem from 2000 miles away. SNMP is how you learn these things from the affect or suspected boxes without getting someone onsite to poke at it.

I would never buy a Dell server for my home... It's much more fun to build my own, but I were to buy one, Dells would certainly be at the top of the consideration list.

[bibble]

Multimediaman. all our servers are dell - I have never had a problemwith them but have only worked there since march.

My problem was more the memory usage; I am a bit newbie to that sort of hardware so like I mentioned i will talk more to mr network on monday