How to determine the sessions parameter in the pfile

We just put an instance of Oracle 9.2 on W23k on line. So far, so good. It's connected to a webserver farm which uses connection pooling to increase or decrease the number of connections based on load. Unfortunately, at some peak load times the maximum number of sessions is reached and users get the "ORA-00020 : Maximum processes exceeeded" . During those periods, the oracle server doesn't seem to be stressed (low CPU usage, etc.) so I think the problem is just that the processes parameter is artificially low.

So, how does one determine a good value for the processes parameter? I'd like to set it as high as the server will handle, but I'd rather not do this by trial and error.

I've read elsewhere that you should budget 7Meg of memory per process. Is this still true in 9.2?

And if it is, presumably I'd calculate a value for the processes parameter by dividing 7 into the total memory available. What should I use for total memory?
o the total SGA
o the max SGA
o the total RAM of the server
o something else?

Thanks.

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//-Walt

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