How big is the SGA and what percentage of the total RAM is it? The total of all the SGAs of Oracle instances on a Windows machine (I'm assuming that we're talking Windows here) should not be greater than 25%. Overly large SGAs will be written to the the pagefile and CPU utilization will go to 100% as Windows thrashes back and forth, trying to get the SGA into RAM. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l