I have seen some old posts on this but need to raise it again and ask URGENTLY for advice. We are getting an intermittent but frequent AV in orageneric8.dll--it's killing us with a major customer.

We're running Oracle 8.1.7; the app is a Delphi 5 ISAPI app running under IIS; DOA 3.4.5. The app has a manager component that has a dedicated datamodule with an OracleSession; it manages a changeable number of child objects, each of which has a similar datamodule with its own OracleSession. The creation of the child object (and thereby their oracle sessions) is done inside a critical section, but logon and logoff of the individual oraclesessions is handled largely by the child objects; within the child object it's blocked in critsecs, but multiple child objects could be logging on/off simultaneously from the viewpoint of the Oracle client (I suppose).

I saw some comments on an earlier thread to the effect that mutexing the OracleSession connection process and/or using one shared connection might resolve it. The second is easier to implement; should I be worried about a bottleneck through that connection if I have 100 queries (owned by different child objects) competing for it? Also, if I do that I assume the TOracleSession.ThreadSafe property should be set true?

ANY IDEAS WELCOME! We're stumped and at our wit's end.

If you upgrade to the current 3.4.6 version and set TOracleSession.ThreadSafe to True, the logon/logoff processes will be performed within a global critical section.

I don't think this should affect performance, but if it does, then you probably have too many logon/logoff activity in your application, and you may want to implement some session reuse concept (e.g. pooling).

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Marco Kalter
Allround Automations

Thanks, Marco. Since posting this topic I reverted to having all my child objects share a single TOracleSession and run all their traffic through it. So far no more orageneric8.dll error--we're only logging on once, ever--and we're monitoring load/performance on that single connection.