Collect information when a recovery failure occurs with Informix Dynamic Server

Question

From time to time, if an Informix Server crashes, the instance may be left in a state where the Server cannot start, and information about the recovery failure is needed. How can the dba collect information when the database has a failure and cannot recover?

Answer

1.Stop any Informix process that are still running. 
2. Load the environment with the parameter: export STOP_RECOVERY=1 (using an appropriate shell command). 
3. Attempt recovery, by starting the oninit process.

• The online log will show a message, similar to the following:
  11:26:34 oninit hung at STOPPING_POINT 1, pid=19548

4. While the engine remains in this state, proceed with information collection, such as:

onstat output, shared memory dump, OS commands etc.

5. After the output is collected, shutdown the engine, using 'onclean -ky', and remove the STOP_RECOVERY environment variable.

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