Oracle Database on Solaris: Backup Fails with Out of Memory

ISSUE

RMAN operations consume additional process memory when opening a session to an Oracle Database instance.  The system user's project must have a high enough shared memory allowance or the operation will fail with:
 

RESOLUTION

To verify and increase the user's share memory run the following:

    As the system user running the backup/restore operations:    

id -p
            # Note the users numerical project id

        prctl -n project.max-shm-memory -i project
            # This will display the current shared memory allowance for the project.  The PRIVILEGE VALUE that is set is 'privileged'

    As root:       

prctl -n project.max-shm-memory -r -v -i project
            # This will set the shared memory allowance for the running environment.  G,M suffixes may be used (4.5G).

        projmod -p -K 'project.max-shm-memory=(priveleged,,deny)'
            # This will set the share memory allowance to survive a restart.  G,M suffixes may be used (4.5G).

References

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 on Oracle Solaris Release Notes - Section 4.1.1
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/relnotes.112/e23559/toc.htm

NOTES

For more detailed information on backup failures and performance issues see Unitrends KB 5062 - Backup Failures and Performance Issues