Hi All, I have an Oracle 11g R2 over a windows server 2008 (am the first of hating Windows, but that's what I have...); it has 10 GB of SGA, 500 process limit -400 processes avg-, db on archive mode. The server has 16 GB of physical memory and 8 cpu cores. Now the problem is this: On the last days, the cpu usage has been growing up about every 12-16 hours, it starts at 8-10 avg, then goes to 28-35, then 65-75, 90-95 and then 100 pick, once it goes to 100% the db hungs (and the server itself hungs) and there's no other solution than restart the instance. All this cpu is used by oracle.exe so, I dowloaded a tool to monitor the specific processes cpu usage at OS Level (MS Process Explorer) and I notice that the heavy load of cpu usage is on 6 processes which are the following: SYSTEM 190 ORACLE.EXE (SHAD) SYSTEM 25 ORACLE.EXE (SHAD) SYSTEM 5 ORACLE.EXE (SHAD) SYSTEM 211 ORACLE.EXE (SHAD) SYSTEM 167 ORACLE.EXE (SHAD) SYSTEM 2 ORACLE.EXE (SHAD) This is something strange because I have 3 similar instances on another server with exactly the same characteristics and I have no problem, even cpu usage goes between 10-20%. Does anybody has an idea of how to know which Oracle processes are related to these (SHAD) processes?, I even stop the EMC for some time without any difference. Thanks in advance. David Ramírez Reyes DBA -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l