JDBC over OCI -- degenerative performance & stability

Hey Folks --

We have run into a degenerative condition running JDBC over Oracle OCI. At first, we were just getting worse & worse performance given the same number of connections in our pool. Now, the JVM has become very unstable and crashes with a mean time to failure of, oh, roughly 6 hours.

We have the following system setup on our load-balanced web tier:

Solaris 2.7
Apache 1.3.9
JDK 1.1.6
JServ 1.1b3
Oracle Client 8.0.5

The Oracle Server is running 8.1.5.

We are running 2 servlet engines per web machine right now, with Jserv load-balancing across them. From our servlets we are making JDBC calls using the Oracle OCI JDBC driver. We have a fairly high number of transactions per second at a very consistent rate (roughly 6 a second per servlet engine, although we were doing more than that until the instability surfaced -- we had to turn some things off). The transactions are quite simple -- simple updates & inserts and 2-table joins (4-table joins at a lower frequency).

The instability is showing up on the JVMs across several of our web boxes, even those that have just recently had the servlets installed. This is what confuses me the most; I have heard bad things about the oracle OCI driver, but why would a brand new installation show the same instability as one that has been running for weeks? That would seem to point to the DB server, but that box is quiet (relatively unloaded), and the DB instance has been bounced many times recently to no avail. What persistent server-side problem could possibly cause this instability in our client?

I understand I am running a lot of older code, and am debating which upgrade is likely to help this problem (JDK1.1.7? JServ 1.1 final? Oracle client and/or server 8.1.6?). Trying the oracle thin driver or a third-party driver would probably prevent the core-dump, but I'm very keen on figuring out what component is to blame for the current problems...

Thanks for any help, and would love to discuss further what I'm seeing...

Michael A. Grafton
Senior Software Engineer
Live365.com
***Check Out My Broadcasts***
[music to code to]

http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=djgrafton
[kitchen-sink]

http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=homie Received on Mon Apr 24 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT