Re: ORA-12500

Douglas Van Horn wrote in message <350FE56F.CB4F8FAB_at_facstall.wisc.edu>...
>Recently two of my users got ORA-12500 errors when they tried to login
>when the server was extremely busy. The error was not repeated for
>either user after the server "quieted down". I'm still curious about
>the error however. In the process of collecting information, I ran
>across this:
>
>>ORA-12500 TNS:listener failed to start a dedicated server process

On Unix there is a kernel parameter that specifies something like the number of child processes a process can fork, or the total number of processes that may be created by a user. In our case we got the above error when we had a huge client load and the max number of processes were reached. A kernel reconfig and re-boot by Unix sysadmin fixed that.

Side Note. I had the same problem running the 7.x listener on NT with Oracle 8. problem disappeared when I used the 8.x listener. I've also seen this error when the Oracle path in the listener is incorrectly configured. So I assume that the error message may not always indicate the actual underlaying problem.

regards,
Billy Received on Wed Mar 18 1998 - 00:00:00 CST