From Oracle 10gR1 onwards, there is serious bug(14373728 and 8553944), due to which the

SYSAUX tablespace will grow continuously. This issue is fixed in 12.1 release
Why It grows?
Whenever statistics in the dictionary are modified, old versions of statistics are saved
automatically for future restoring. This history information is stored in SYSAUX tablespace and
tables involved in this are as below:
WRI$_OPTSTAT_OPR
WRI$_OPTSTAT_AUX_HISTORY
WRI$_OPTSTAT_TAB_HISTORY
WRI$_OPTSTAT_IND_HISTORY
WRI$_OPTSTAT_HISTGRM_HISTORY
WRI$_OPTSTAT_HISTHEAD_HISTORY
By default, the MMON performs the automatic purge that removes all stats history older than
the following:
* current time - statistics history retention (by default 31 days)
* time of recent analyze in the system - 1
MMON performs the purge of the optimizer stats history automatically, but it has an internal limit
of 5 minutes to perform this job.MMON will do this activity once in 24 hrs. If the operation takes
more than 5 minutes, then it is aborted and stats not purged. No trace or alert message is
reported. Because of this, as time elapse more data will be accommodated in above tables.
Statistics history retention is configurable using the ALTER_STATS_HISTORY_RETENTION
procedure.

How to Identify
After running $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/awrinfo.sql (Doc ID 1292724.1), found the
largest consumer to be SM/OPTSTAT and SM/AWR
Note: When collected data for AWR and similar OP_STAT tables reaches an internally defined
threshold volume of data Oracle will automatically create partitions . This AWR, SQLSETs and
similar data is then stored in partitions including WRH/WRI based objects.

(1b) SYSAUX occupants space usage (v$sysaux_occupants)

********************************************************
|

(3b) Space usage within AWR Components (> 500K)

**********************************

COMPONENT
MB SEGMENT_NAME - % SPACE_USED
SEGMENT_TYPE
--------- --------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------ASH
382.0 WRH$_ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY.WRH$_ACTIVE_3563904870_4350
- 97% TABLE PARTITION
ASH
38.0
WRH$_ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY_PK.WRH$_ACTIVE_3563904870_4350 - 98%
INDEX PARTITION

(4) Space usage by non-AWR components (> 500K)

**********************************
COMPONENT
MB SEGMENT_NAME
SEGMENT_TYPE
--------- --------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------NON_AWR 3,220.0 SYS.I_WRI$_OPTSTAT_HH_OBJ_ICOL_ST
INDEX
NON_AWR 2,905.0 SYS.WRI$_OPTSTAT_HISTHEAD_HISTORY
TABLE
NON_AWR 1,930.0 SYS.I_WRI$_OPTSTAT_HH_ST
NON_AWR
448.0 SYS.I_WRI$_OPTSTAT_H_OBJ#_ICOL#_ST
INDEX
NON_AWR
296.0 SYS.WRI$_OPTSTAT_HISTGRM_HISTORY
TABLE
NON_AWR
232.0 SYS.I_WRI$_OPTSTAT_H_ST
NON_AWR
168.0 SYS.I_WRI$_OPTSTAT_TAB_OBJ#_ST
NON_AWR
141.0 SYS.SYS_LOB0000006306C00038$$
LOBSEGMENT
NON_AWR
104.0 SYS.I_WRI$_OPTSTAT_TAB_ST

INDEX

INDEX
INDEX

INDEX

Also we may use the following queries.

(1)select occupant_desc,space_usage_kbytes/1024 space_mb, substr(schema_name,1,30)

Schema from v$sysaux_occupants order by 2 desc;

(2)select OCCUPANT_NAME,SCHEMA_NAME,SPACE_USAGE_KBYTES from

V$SYSAUX_OCCUPANTS;
(3)select segment_name,segment_type,bytes from dba_segments where owner='SYS' and
tablespace_name='SYSAUX' and segment_name like 'WRI$_OPTSTAT%'order by bytes desc;
How to resolve
1. Turn off the Autoextend on the SYSAUX at the earliest to ensure that the tablespace doesnt
grow out of bounds and finally become complete unmanageable.
2. Manually purge old statistics using DBMS_STATS.purge_stats as below

Find out your present retention value using the below statement
select dbms_stats.get_stats_history_retention from dual;
SQL> select dbms_stats.get_stats_history_retention from dual;
GET_STATS_HISTORY_RETENTION
--------------------------31
Find out the oldest statistics history using below statement(Shows available stats that have not
been purged):
select dbms_stats.get_stats_history_availability from dual;
SQL> select dbms_stats.get_stats_history_availability from dual;
GET_STATS_HISTORY_AVAILABILITY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

05-NOV-12 05.31.04.053232000 AM +05:30

Set retention of old stats to less number of days. I set here it to 10 days as below.
exec dbms_stats.alter_stats_history_retention(&days);
SQL> exec dbms_stats.alter_stats_history_retention(10);
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL> select dbms_stats.get_stats_history_retention from dual;
GET_STATS_HISTORY_RETENTION
--------------------------10
Purge stats older than 10 days. Best to do this in stages if there is a lot of data (sysdate30,sydate-28 etc)since it consumes more resources. Do this activity during less activities on the
database. This purge will delete data from WRI$ tables.
Below command will purge stats which is older than 28 days.
SQL> exec dbms_stats.purge_stats(sysdate-28);

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Below command shows available stats that have not been purged
SQL> select dbms_stats.get_stats_history_availability from dual;

Once purge is done, reorg these tables to release space to the database. Refer ID 1271178.1
for more details.