Oracle-L: Re: ORA-20 - Maximum Processes Exceeded

From: <Jared.Still_at_radisys.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 16:08:44 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.004B7257.20020815160844@fatcity.com>

I found the solution, and it's a bit obscure.

The problem is detailed in MetaLink Note 152868.1

Problem Description

You have seen in the v$process view that the number of processes without a
session are growing up one every 5 minutes, until the processes limit is reached

and an ORA-20 is shown.

You have tried to debug the process at system level without success, because you've
seen that the process doesn't exists anymore.

You have stopped all third applications and Oracle Services including the listener,
but the number of process still is growing up.

Solution Description

Open %ORACLE_HOME%/dbs/operf81.log file to check if an ORA-1017 error is generated
every time Oracle Performance Monitor tries to connect to the database.

If so, the credentials used by Oracle Performance Monitor are out of date.
Use operfcfg utility or modify appropiate entries in the registry (HKLM/System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Oracle8\Performance), to update the

Jared.Still_at_radisys.com
Sent by: root_at_fatcity.com
08/14/2002 12:01 PM
Please respond to ORACLE-L

        To:     Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com>
        cc: 
        Subject:        ORA-20 - Maximum Processes Exceeded

Dear list,

I'm running into a strange problem on one of my dev databases.

First, the particulars:

Dell Dual Pentium III
1 Gig Ram
Oracle 8.1.6

The database in question is used for testing and development on a customized 3rd party app.

This past week I've seen the app max out the number of processes by logging in with one of it's utilities until there were no processes left.

This morning something a little different happened. The ORA-20 popped up again, but this time, there were not corresponding entries in v$session.

Joining v$session and v$process returned only 31 rows, while there were actually 150 rows in v$process. Very strange.

I then tried to use oradebug to get a processstate dump, and the first attempt completed very quickly, and no trace file was generated.

e.g.

SVMGR> oradebug setorapid 100
Windows thread id: 664, image: ORACLE.EXE SVRMGR> oradebug dump processstate 10
SVRMGR> . I then tried to use oradebug to get a processstate dump again with a different level, and that never did complete.

SVMGR> oradebug setorapid 100
Windows thread id: 664, image: ORACLE.EXE SVRMGR> oradebug dump processstate 1
...

A subsequent attempt on another PID with a dump level of 10 did the same thing, it hung.

At this point I bounced the database, which took a few minutes.

Any ideas on how to go about troubleshooting this?

I may run a periodic job to capture some v$process and v$session info for post mortem use, but a dump would be helpful to find out what the orphaned processes are.

Thanks,

Jared

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Author:
INET: Jared.Still_at_radisys.com

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Author:
INET: Jared.Still_at_radisys.com

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