Windows memory error in sunny Florida

I was just at a shop in sunny southern Florida last week. They have a DB2 V7.2 (no longer supported by IBM) database on windows 2k and are getting ready to migrate to V8.2 on Windows 2003 in the near future. Despite my suggestions it looks like they are staying on 32 bit.

I was brought in to do a health check because they are starting to get some very vague memory errors from Windows in the form of a pop-up box when 2 of their scheduled jobs overlap. When they click the 'OK' button on the pop-up box it occasionally causes the instance to shutdown. The only problem is that there is never any information logged into the diag.log nor is there any dump or trap files created. After thorough review and attempts to recreate the problem, I couldn't find anything with the DB2 environment that looked to be the cause.

I suggested some ways to get their jobs running faster and ways they could conserve memory on their system. One suggestion is to set the db2set registry variable of DB2MEMMAXFREE to 2MB which lets the idle agents release most of the memory they have ahold of and keep only 2MB (the default is 8MB). I also showed them how to capture and format a trace when that memory error pops up again and they click the 'OK' button.

One unexpected issue I found was security. They are using AUTHENTICATION = CLIENT and TRUSTALLCLIENTS=YES. I suggested some ways to lock down their security a little better at the authentication layer and the database and table level.

Has anyone out there ever run into a memory error such as this?