It could be that your database is having too many incoming connection. On Solaris default for listener is to accept 5 concurrent connection request. Try increasing QUEUE_SIZE in listener.ora and reload the listener. Verify that changes have taken place by verifying in lsnrctl status. http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/network.102/b14213/listener.htm #sthref781 Cheers, Vishal Gupta From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sunil Kanderi Sent: 18 September 2007 17:46 To: Nigel Thomas Cc: oracle-l Subject: Re: Weird database hanging Thanks to all those who responded. Some web applications do use connection pooling and some don't. I will need to find out the upper limits on the session pool size and also the rate of session starts. Thanks for the pointers. Thanks, Sunil. On 9/18/07, Nigel Thomas <nigel_cl_thomas@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: ----- Original Message ---- From: Sunil Kanderi sunil.kanderi@xxxxxxxxx .... We have lots of web applications running from that database and once in a while there is a sudden spike in the number of connections from a Oracle user related to one of the web applications and the concurrent connections for that particular web application user jumps from 10 or 15 concurrent connections to 100s in less than a couple of minutes. The database and the server hang until these connections are cleared. At times we cannot even get a connection to the server when this happens. I usually don't see any alerts in the alert log when this happens. --------------- Sunil From this, I can't say why you see the initial slowdown - but I can say it is common for connection pools to behave suicidally when faced with a slow down. Traffic piling into the connection pool causes an explosion in the number of connections - and there's nothing like a flood of new connections to make the traffic jam worse. See http://preferisco.blogspot.com/2007/02/avoiding-application-suicide-by-sessi on.html. Regards Nigel