What does it mean? What do I do about it?
Example alert from the Protop Portal:
What does it mean?
Asynchronous Page Writers are "helper" processes that perform disk IO, flushing dirty blocks from shared memory, on behalf of the user so that the user does not need to wait. There should always be an APW running and you have none for this database.
What to do?
Start an APW or two (if there are more than 2, remove the excess) when you start your other helper processes (AIW, BIW, Watchdog, etc):
proapw <dbname>
Or enable it in OEE or OEM.
Note: It is rare to need more than 1 or 2 APWs.
If all else fails...
Contact us at support@wss.com or use the online chat. We'll be happy to help.