Oracle Database 19c -- ORA-00700: soft internal error, arguments: [pga physmem limit]

Problem

When starting up an Oracle Instance, in the alert log files the following messages are shown:

 

PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET specified is high
Errors in file /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/test_prm/test/trace/test_ora_39101.trc  (incident=25605):
ORA-00700: soft internal error, arguments: [pga physmem limit], [7650410496], [6900337254], [], [], [], [], [], []
, [], [], []
Incident details in: /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/test_prm/test/incident/incdir_25605/test_ora_39101_i25605.trc 

 

Solution

ORA-700 errors are referred to as soft asserts, to note that something unexpected has happened, but not fatal to a process or instance, so the process may continue with no harm.

ORA-700 [pga physmem limit] and ORA-700 [SMS PHYSMEM LIMIT] are raised when:

2xPGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET + SGA_TARGET > 90% of physical memory

Particularly for ORA-00700: soft internal error, arguments: [pga physmem limit], [7650410496], [6900337254], the first number is the requested PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET value, and the second number is a desired value, which should be set to prevent the warning. The same can be confirmed from the accompanied trace file:

========= Dump for incident 25605 (ORA 700 [pga physmem limit]) ========
[TOC00003]
----- Beginning of Customized Incident Dump(s) -----

WARNING: PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET (7296 MB) is too high for
         the amount of physical memory (60134 MB) and
         SGA size (40960 MB) - it should be less than 6580 MB.

----- End of Customized Incident Dump(s) -----
[TOC00003-END]

To fix the issue, adjust either SGA size or PGA size.