8i listener stops responding;spawns a second non functional listener process

Hi all,

On Solaris 2.6 with ORacle 8.1.6.2 the listener sometimes(a couple times per week) stops responding. There are no errors in the listener.ora and the listener is just too active to turn tracing on. Connection attempts will time out(I have increased the timeout from 10 seconds to 30 seconds). lsnrctl commands also hang.

At the OS level, a ps -ef shows 2 listener processes when only one was started(there is only one when the listener is working.

I'm at a loss here as there isn't any error to use as a starting point. Background info is that the server(6500) has 20 processors which run at about 10% idle, 9gb ram with about 2-3 gb free, 9gb swap with about 8gb free. The listener gets about 1-3 connection requests per second. I am not using multithreaded server.

Any advice?

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Dave A