ORA-16401: archivelog rejected by RFS

How big is your list of "known" issues for systems that you support?

How many of them are related to bugs in Oracle
and what portion is the "expected" behaviour that covered
by existing technical/business requirements and processes?

How often do you revise the list to check of the "known" issues
can be fixed and removed from the "list"?

Every time when new job is taken first months are spent just to get
understanding what are the "known" issues/problems, how to react to them,
whom to call, what to write, etc. And since you are the new one here
you would like to show how cool and smart you are, you are trying to
fix the issues suggesting different approaches, methods. And when
time comes to do changes - you stuck with existing environment
and your strength is going away little by little and your list of "known" issues
is growing as well :(

How is the said before related to the error that is in the subject.
Well based on a description it can be ignored and there is nothing bad
to add it to ignore list or to the list of "known" issues.
Will be anything missed and hidden under that error? Who knows :)

In this case the error had periodic occurrence and after some checking
on primary side I found out that crontab job was doing backup of archive
log files at the same time time every hour and archive_lag_target was set
to 1800 (30 mins). So every second log file switch initiated by the parameter
coincided with switch initiated by RMAN backup command.

Difference of several seconds in log switches was too much for RFS to handle
quickly and was reported in alert log.

Tue Feb 24 00:05:02 2009
Primary database is in MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE mode
kcrrvslf: active RFS archival for log 1 thread 1 sequence 1117
RFS[12]: Successfully opened standby log 5: '+DATA/test/onlinelog/group_5.272.677123691'
Tue Feb 24 00:05:02 2009
Redo Shipping Client Connected as PUBLIC
-- Connected User is Valid
RFS[21]: Assigned to RFS process 27094
RFS[21]: Identified database type as 'physical standby'
Primary database is in MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE mode
kcrrvslf: active RFS archival for log 2 thread 1 sequence 1118
RFS[12]: Successfully opened standby log 4: '+DATA/test/onlinelog/group_4.273.677123691'
Errors in file /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/testb/TEST/trace/TEST_rfs_27094.trc:
ORA-16401: archivelog rejected by RFS


Finally I changed archive_lag_target to 2400 (40 mins)
and it helped to avoid consecutive log switches within seconds.

No errors so far in alert log and I believe that "known" issue
will be removed from the list soon.

Have a good day!