SMON—the System Monitor

The System Monitor is responsible for performing the following operations:

  • Instance recovery at startup

  • Cleanup of unneeded temporary segments

  • Coalescing of contiguous free extents

  • Instance recovery for a failed CPU or instance in a Parallel Server environment

The SMON process “wakes up” on a regular basis to check whether any of these operations are required. In addition, other background processes can wake up SMON if they require one of these services.

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