SAP Knowledge Base Article
1900257 - How to handle HANA Alert 43: 'Memory Usage of Services'
Component: HAN-DB-MON (SAP HANA > SAP HANA Database > SAP HANA Monitoring), Version: 12,
Released On: 22.11.2023
Symptom
When checking the Alerts tab in HANA Studio and Solution Manager, there is an alert called “indexserver (pid 45281) on host
suse-hanajl01 is running out of memory! Used memory: 180500 MB, effective allocation limit for this service: 534219 MB”.
For HANA Studio, you would find the alert by going to Administration Console -> Alert -> Show: all alert.
For Solution Manager, you would find the alert by transaction DBACOCKPIT -> choose HANA system -> expand Current
Status -> Alerts.
Remember for this “Check used memory against allocation limit” alert in Solution Manager, it is auto-refreshed every 15
minutes, so the time stamp on the alert may be not the exactly time when alert occurs.
To check the exact time, please go to Administration Console -> Alerts -> double click on the alerts.
Image/data in this KBA is from SAP internal systems, sample data, or demo systems. Any resemblance to real data is
purely coincidental
Environment
SAP HANA DATABASE
BW on HANA
Cause
Normally there are 3 reasons for this alert:
1. The threshold value of "Check used memory against allocation limit" in "Configure Check Settings" is improper. The
default value is Low: 80, Medium: 90, High: 95.
2. Out of memory (OOM) issue occurs on HANA DB
The other possible reasons for this current utilized percentage of main memory alert is OOM issue occurs on HANA
system, including but not limited to
Execution of certain transactions
Data loading
Hanging of jobs
Long running SQL statements
They will generate a high workload on memory by either frequent access to database or joining between huge tables.
3. Bug in some revisions
As we experienced in previous customer case, used memory cannot automatic released in some older revisions. This
bug would lead to memory issues and trigger the alert.
Resolution
1. For the alert triggered due to improper threshold value setting, it could be resolved by reset it to default
or more reasonable threshold value.
2. For the alert triggered due to Memory pressure/High consumption, but no OOM events observed yet
Using some of the methods as outlined in KBA 3011480 - How-To : Troubleshooting SAP HANA Memory Consumption :
Check this monitoring view 'M_HEAP_MEMORY' and filter on the internal communications port (Column 'PORT') of
the affected HANA service, to get the details on the highest consuming heap allocators.
i.e, let's take the typical port number 30003 for the indexserver :
SELECT * FROM M_HEAP_MEMORY WHERE PORT = '30003' ORDER BY EXCLUSIVE_SIZE_IN_USE DESC
Then it is just a case of actioning the problem heap allocators (column 'CATEGORY') identified from the above query as
explained in section '13. What can I do if a certain heap allocator is unusually large?' - 1999997 - FAQ: SAP HANA
Memory
3. For the alert triggered due to OOM issue
a. Note 1984422 describes how to analyze an out of memory (OOM) dump file, see also Note 1999997 - FAQ: SAP
HANA Memory.
b. If we know which process runs out of memory, we could trace this process, and send the trace file to SAP for further
analysis. The trace includes SQL trace and performance trace. Both of them could be done in the Trace
Configuration tab.
For SQL trace, after changing it to “Active” and giving a new file name, click “Finish”.
For performance trace, give a new file name and a duration time, then click “Finish”.
c. If we do not sure which process caused this alert, then we need try to figure out as the following steps.
- Go to Landscape tab to check which server encounters the high memory consumption issue. E.g: the memory
consumption is very high in indexserver with Port 30003.
- Go to Performance -> Threads, check which threads are running. E.g: a SQL statement is executed in the figure.
- Running the SQL again, if the issue is reproduced, we could make sure that the statement is (one of) the main
cause of the alert.
- Do the trace as previous mentioned, and enclose the trace files in the Customer Message.
d. The trace files could be seen in Diagnosis Files tab
The SQL trace file can be opened by double clicks on it.
But for the performance trace file, if you want to read it, you need to use HDBAdmin tool to open it. Please refer to
blog post How to use HDBAdmin to analyze performance traces in SAP HANA to execute the tool.
In the SQL trace file (richard0128.py), we could download it to local and open it with Notepad++, then find the
SQL tracing info,
After you prepare your environment and execute HDBAdmin tool, we could load the .tpt file and read it.
Then we could filter the result with known info (e.g Service is indexserver, Method is SqlExecuteStatement, User
is SYSTEM) and take a further analysis on the SQL statement.
Even if you could do it by yourself, we still recommend you to send the trace files to SAP unless you are very sure
about how to analysis, optimize and configure in further steps.
e. Before the statement analysis finished, we could try to unload the current unused huge tables from memory, to save
the memory resource for the process execution.
The huge tables could be found in “System Information” -> “Schema Size (MB) for loaded tables” and “Size of
tables on disk”.
After double click on them, we could sort the size column as the following figure shows, to justify if a table is in
use, you can go to Performance -> Threads tab, to check if the table is used by any thread.
4. If the revision of HANA DB is not the latest version, we strongly recommend to upgrade to the HANA DB to
the latest version. If the current licensed memory cannot meet the workload requirements, you may need to increase
it.
Keywords
allocation limit, Configure Check Settings, OOM, out of memory, threshold, Diagnosis Files, performance, HDBAdmin,
licensed memory, indexserver
Products
Products
SAP HANA 1.0, platform edition
This document refers to
SAP Note/KBA Component Title
3011480 HAN-DB-ENG How-To : Troubleshooting SAP HANA Memory Consumption
1999997 HAN-DB FAQ: SAP HANA Memory
This document is referenced by
SAP Note/KBA Component Title
3011480 How-To : Troubleshooting SAP HANA Memory Consumption
1999997 HAN-DB FAQ: SAP HANA Memory
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