Stalling stored procs?

Okay, here's the environment

AIX 4.x on an RS6k, Oracle 8.1.6, lots of free disk space and RAM, nothing else going on on the system. Under normal circumstances the system is primarily OLTP but has a batch cycle that lasts an hour or two per day. We can't interrupt the OLTP during the batch processing on a regular basis, and one particular phase of batch which calls a stored proc a few hundred times in a row was causing a problem periodically with live transactions taking took long. I was able to get actual OLTP activity suspended and turn on a progress journal built into the stored procs during that sub-job one night and what I found was that we were apparently stalled for more than 10 of the 27 minutes the job ran (6 stalls, 1.5-2.5 minutes each). Roughly 1/2 hour is the normal run length for the job, so I don't think the addition of the progress info played any role. I'm looking for information from anyone on circumstances under which they have observed stalling or something that might be interpreted that way.

Thanks for any clues.

Greg Received on Sun Oct 15 2000 - 21:12:15 CDT