Connecting forks a child process

Question for the wise oracle(s)...

Writing a system under AIX. We use Roguewave to front end oracle. Fine. Everything's just ducky.
Lately, we've run into this problem where when we try to connect to a database and its listener is not there or the database is down (anything that causes a connect failure, really), I'll end up with a zombie process. I've since fixed the problem, we didn't have a signal handler to capture the SIGCLD from the child process, because I DIDN'T KNOW THERE WAS A CHILD PROCESS. The problem is fixed, I'm just trying to understand. Why does the oracle client library (I'm assuming this is who is responsible) fork a kid as part of the connect process.

There's a small chance it's Roguewave doing it, and I'm looking into that too, but that I have source for. I know nothing about the innards of Oracle. My DBA tells me what I'm seeing isn't happening, that oracle doesn't fork processes on the client side. Well, that's all fine and good (and I respect the guy highly), but the fact is I'm getting SIGCLD's so there's a fork somewhere and it ain't me.

Anybody have any information or places to look for info, I'd greatly appreciate.

Stu Mark
nixo_at_prodigy.net Received on Tue Aug 03 1999 - 12:36:57 CDT