Question:
Error 208 appears regularly on my IBM RS6000 running Informix 7.3. The onconfig setting for shared mem is 0 ( no limit). What do I do about this?

Answer:
This is a memory allocation error. I’d check the kernel configuration parameters and compare them with the ones in $INFORMIXDIR/release. You’ll probably need to work with your UNIX system administrator on this.

Also, check the amount of swap space and make sure you have enough swap space allocated. Monitor the memory footprint of your instance by running onstat and watching the amount of memory allocated for Informix. If you find it steadily increasing until you get the 208 errors, this may indicate that you are approaching some kernel memory limits.