I had a similar issue a couple of months ago. My problem was that a few "popular" tables, which are regularly updated/accessed by most of the application had INITRANS too low & sessions were going into ENQUEUE wait state. Run this simple SQL the next time a "slowdown" occurs... SELECT DECODE(request,0,'Holder: ','Waiter: ')||sid sess, id1, id2, lmode, request, type FROM V$LOCK WHERE (id1, id2, type) IN (SELECT id1, id2, type FROM V$LOCK WHERE request>0) ORDER BY id1, request / We had folks to started an UPDATE (got a lock) and then literally went to lunch to 90 minutes! Other sessions would hang quietly waiting for the resource. HTH & YMMV! ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------