TNS-12500

Hi All:

We've got a problem I thought I'd throw it out here in the hopes that somebody has seen this type of behavior before. Some details about our system are at the end of this post.

We have a software application that basically creates around 20 connections to Oracle (from ten different computers) and runs a bunch of SQL queries to read from a smallish database (around 2 gig). This process of connecting and reading is repeated over and over for an undetermined amount of time.

After awhile, sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 2 days, the computers connecting to Oracle start to generate an occasional error when trying to connect. The error is 'TNS-12500: TNS:listener failed to start a dedicated server process'. Awhile after this error starts to appear the computers simply hang while trying to connect to Oracle.

After this has happened, nobody can connect to Oracle from a remote computer. That is to say, if I run SQL*Plus, it just hangs indefinately after I enter my username/password.

If I telnet to the Oracle machine, I CAN still run SQL*Plus from the telnet session and Oracle seems fine. However, if I try and run 'ps' or 'top' from the Linux prompt, my telnet session hangs.

The only cure we've found is to reboot the Oracle machine (using the reboot command).

It is important to note that this exact same software application with the exact same data has worked fine on a different oracle system (oracle 8.1.6 on Redhat Linux 6.2 on a no-name dual-processor box) for two years.

We have spent many hours on the phone with Oracle and Dell listening to them point fingers at each other. I'm about to give up and simply try another configuration of OS/Oracle but I thought I'd see if anybody has any input first.

I apologize in advance if the information below is too vague to be of much help. I am most interested in the error messages in the listener.log file.

#####listener.log#####

TNS-12500: TNS:listener failed to start a dedicated server process  TNS-12547: TNS:lost contact
  TNS-12560: TNS:protocol adapter error
   TNS-00517: Lost contact
    Linux Error: 32: Broken pipe
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#####System Specs#####

Oracle Version: 8.1.7
Linux: Redhat 7.1 with Oracle/OS patches installed

Hardware:
DELL Server
Quad-Xeon processors
2 gig RAM
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Received on Wed Feb 06 2002 - 10:51:55 CST