pro*c performance question

I have an application that executes many select statements and manuipulates explicit cursors by doing declare, open , fetch, close.

In order to hold all the cursors (implicit and explicit) open at all times and thus reduce the amount of parsing I have compiled my program with options "hold_cursor=yes" and "release_cursor=no" . According to Oracle's documentation even if I issue a "close cursor" statement the cursor will still stay open and I will avoid reparsing of the statements thus the performance will be increased.

After compiling my program I see absolutely no change in the amount of time that my program and the oracle engine eats !

If anyone has done any pro*c tuning before and has any insight into what the problem might be , please post your replies.

                                                                   Regards,
                                                                  <<<saeed>>>