ORA-00020: Maximum Number of Processes Exceeded

[darryl_staflund]

Hi there,

If I attempt to log onto a database and get the following error:

ORA-00020: Maximum number of processes exceeded

then PL/SQL Developer seems to enter an infinite loop in which it continually tries to connect before re-displaying the above message. There is no way I can end the logon attempts (that I can find) short of killing the process.

Sincerely,
Darryl Staflund

 

[Marco Kalter]

That is a strange problem. If a connection fails, an error message will be displayed and you can retry. Maybe this is an environment problem. Can you go to Help > About, press the 'Info' button, press the 'Copy all pages' button on this info screen, and paste this text into an e-mail reply?

 

[aotte]

Could it be that you are running the Oracle Server on a Windows machine?

I have a friend who has been seeing that, and they determined it was a Windows/Oracle marriage issue.

 

[darryl_staflund]

Hi all,

Thanks for your help and suggestions mkalter, and thanks for the tip aotte. Yes we are running Oracle on NT. The problem only occured briefly over the span of a couple of hours so it's not terribly intrusive. The next time it happens, I'll jump on the opportunity to search about Oracle Technet for further clues about the behaviour.

Cheers,
Darryl

 

[aotte]

I asked about the Windows thing, and the answer I got was that it was caused by an Oracle Performance "thingy" that was trying to logon to the server, but failing, and each - automatic - try was eating up the processes. It apparently has to do with a default user/password not being there.

Apparently it is in the documentation, but not clearly marked that it would have this kind of dramatic consequence.

Hope that helps in your search.

 

[darryl_staflund]

Hi aotte,

Your posting seems to hit home with the problem we had. It only happened after our DBA had copied a schema (ddl and data) from one database to another and reset the password in doing do. I don't know what he did after I talked with him about the issue but I was able to log on shortly afterward and never encountered the repetitive PL/SQL Developer message again

Darryl