SQL*Net tuning - what's reasonable for response times

I have a third party application that needs to connect to the database over a local area network and run a faily simple query to obtain a customer balance - all in less then 6 seconds.

Some performance measurements show that 4 seconds is being consumed by establishing the connection (login). On average the database has 50 to 70 active connections at any given time with a highwater mark of 119 connections.

Everything is running on NT 4.0 (workstation and server) and the network protocol is TCP/IP on 100mb ethernet. The server is a dual pentium with 1GB of memory.

Question: does 4 seconds to login seem reasonable? I've never before given much though to tuning connect times - my focus has always been on tuning queries, memory usage, etc.. Frankly, 4 seconds strikes me as not bad.

I have been unable to track down any information regarding tuning SQL*Net and would appreciate any recommentations on how I can reduce this 4 seconds unless the consensus is that 4 seconds is exceptionally good performance. Received on Wed Aug 19 1998 - 23:06:20 CDT