Shared Memory Conflicts

In a production environment, it would be unusual to have more than one server running on the same system, and Sybase strongly recommends against doing this. In a development environment, however, this situation can occur.

If you run more than one server or client on the same UNIX machine, and shared memory is enabled, you must take certain precautions to prevent users from connecting to the wrong server.

When attempting to start a server, you may see the following message:

DBSPAWN ERROR -96 -- database engine already running

This error indicates that the startup process is finding the shared memory segment of a server started earlier, and is unable to create a shared memory segment. This error may occur when either a Sybase IQ or SQL Anywhere server is running. (Interactive SQL also connects to an earlier server if its shared memory port is visible, even if you intended for it to connect to a server started later.) You can avoid the error if you run only one server per system, either Sybase IQ or SQL Anywhere.