And the fine manual says: (shared server, oracle 9.2) --- quote The appropriate number of dispatchers for each instance depends upon the performance you want from your database, the host operating system limit on the number of connections for each process, which is operating system dependent, and the number of connections required for each network protocol. Calculating the Initial Number of Dispatchers Once you know the number of possible connections for each process for the operating system, calculate the initial number of dispatchers to create during instance startup, for each network protocol, using the following formula. --- end quote Does anyone know what the "number of possible connections for each process" is for Solaris 9? Thanks! Barb -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l