Oracle Shared Mode for Asp.net

It seems some DBAs have some sort of problem with using Oracle shared mode vs. dedicated.

What happens is, we have several Asp.Net sites that consume the oracle database. Each site, thus asp.net application uses a pool of 30 or more connections. Given the fact we have around 10 active sites, sometimes there are 200 ~ 300 connections to Oracle.

Out of those 200 connections, most of them spend more time in idle than not, around 30 active conections for 170 idle, which of course as uses browse the sites changes a little.

We are using AIX as operating system, and have 8GB of RAM (yeah, don't even get me started on that).

Because each connection uses somewhere from 20 to 60 MB, that is trashing the memory usage.

When using Shared mode, memory usage obviously goes way lower even if setting the number of dispatchers to 10.

Question:

Is there a good reason why not to use Shared mode? Considering the Asp.net/Web typical behaviour.

Why do, not one or two, but a few dbas insist in believing Dedicated is the only way you should use oracle.

By the way, anyone has any AIX tips, is it just me or is AIX a pain!?

Thanks in advance,
Cablito Received on Sun Jun 17 2007 - 15:09:00 CDT