If I recall correctly, hard parse grabs a bunch of latches; and the bigger the shared pool, the worse the latch contention can get. Although it seems counter intuitive, I think, in this case, the piece of duct tape you apply is to REDUCE the size of the shared pool. >-----Original Message----- >When the >shared pool "fills up", all that means is that additional SQL >which gets >hard parsed must move some other SQL out of the shared pool. >This is not a >problem unless the SQL moved out is needed again. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l