DBWR timed-out, what causes this?

We are running Oracle v7.2.3 on HP-UX v10.01 in a production environment with ~1200 users. It's been running fairly well since 1997... until this past Monday.

The database died Monday night and the only clue I have is a trace file from the DBWR with ORA-7404: sfareq: Time-out occurred waiting for request to complete. Cause: The master database writer timed out waiting for a write or close to complete. One of the database writers may have stopped running.

We have 4 database writer processes, brought them up in January of '98 and have never seen an ORA-7404 until now. Got another ORA-7404 this morning during the workday with lots of users on. I'm rather anxious to discover why a database writer would go flaky twice in 3 days. Database is down each night for a full cold backup (business requirement.)

Any ideas what is the real cause of a database writer failing? We see no evidence of hardware failures.

Thanks for your help!

Rose Received on Wed Jan 27 1999 - 13:59:40 CST