Failed to acquire semaphore

I'm not familiar with HPUX but I had a similar problem with a SCO OpenServer database server. You probably need to tune the kernel and add more semaphores. Check your HPUX manuals for exactly how to do this. Oracle's application or installation notes might have some hints too.

You might turn on performance auditing to try to pinpoint exactly what resources are running out.

Good luck and happy hunting!

Yes, you do need to update your kernel. You can do so through sam. Here is what you do.

At the command line type sam &
A System Administration Manager GUI will open
Double click kernel configuration
Double click configurable parameters
After a few seconds a new window will open.

Anything that starts with sem or shm may need to be increased. The most important is shmmax. The structure of your database dictates what you set these to and you may be better advised from a DBA on what to set them to. Try to set your shmmax to 10000000 (that may still need to increase if you have problems, but try not to make it much bigger than it needs to be). Other extremely important values are shmmni, shmseg, semmns, semmni and semmnl.

Good luck.