TNS-12500

Noone replied to this on c.d.o so posting here...please help if you can.

Hi Oracle experts,

We are getting this error on our Oracle system. I've searched Google, MSDN, Oracle tech support and newsgroups to death, but our DBAs seem to have already applied all the solutions suggested. Here's the relevant part from the Listener log:

TNS-12500: TNS:listener failed to start a dedicated server process  TNS-12540: TNS:internal limit restriction exceeded   TNS-12560: TNS:protocol adapter error
   TNS-00510: Internal limit restriction exceeded     32-bit Windows Error: 8: Exec format error

Oracle is running on Windows 2000 - dual processor machine with several gigs of RAM. The base error seems to be a Windows error 8 - "not enough storage is available to complete this operation" - if I'm reading the log correctly. Here are some facts:

• the error occurs when the DB is under heavy load, and at that point is intermittent - some connection requests get rejected, whether they come from SQLPlus or from the rich VB client over ODBC, but others are honored.
• the server has plenty of spare RAM even when connections are being refused.
• the server CPUs are at around 50% utilization when the problem happens.
• we have already increased the PROCESSES parameter in the ini file to way more than we need (I think it's currently at 700 and we only have a couple hundred connections according to Spotlight - in any case we are nowhere near the max connections)
• we used the 3GB process patch for Windows 2000 to make sure the Oracle process has enough memory.
• we have reduced the "SGA" size as mentioned in several articles
• nothing is logged in the Oracle Alerts
• nothing is logged in any of the Windows 2000 Event Logs
• the Listener responds fine to tnsping (albeit with somewhat increased ping times)

The only thing I can think is that the Listener is using some Windows OS kernel object to communicate with the Oracle process (Semaphores probably?) and there is some system-wide limit on whatever those objects are, which the Listener is somehow exceeding.

Oracle technical support of course blames it on the O/S - "Oracle consumes O/S resources just like any other app."

We are going to reengineer the app to use connections more efficiently, but for now we need to put this fire out.

Any help much appreciated!

-Darren. Received on Fri Jul 11 2003 - 07:45:32 CDT