jobs not starting in a timely fashion

I'm using Oracle 8.1.7.0 on NT. I have a process that submits several (30 to 40) jobs to be run as soon as possible. My job_queue_processes is 4 and job_queue_interval is 20. What happens is that all the jobs are in the queue and 4 start running. Each of the jobs are "finished" at different times but seem to hang waiting for the longest job to finish. (I've checked to see if locks are the culprit but it doesn't seem so). After the 4 jobs are done and removed from the queue, there is about a 5 MINUTE delay before the next set starts. This continues until all the jobs are finished. I've checked all the things I know about over the last 2 or 3 weeks but can't find what's wrong. We went to 8.1.7 from 8.1.5 and this problem showed up. It worked fine on 8.1.5.

Any insight will be appreciated.

Thanks,
  Alton Received on Sat May 04 2002 - 13:04:39 CDT