SQL*Net - Connection Timeout

I have a problem with a remote database, where any attempt to connect to that database from one particular client hangs indefinitely (more precisely, for longer than I have been willing to wait to see if it's actually "hours" rather than "forever" :-)) The inability to connect from this particular client isn't a major problem, but having jobs which attempt to connect hang indefinitely rather than fail with a TNS timeout error is.

I have looked through the SQL*Net reference, and asked colleagues, but I cannot find any way of setting a parameter to say that the client (OCI, actually Python with cx_Oracle) connection should timeout after XXX seconds, regardless. Is there such a setting anywhere?

The connection attempt is part of a long-running process, so I cannot simply kill the hung process. Running the connection in a thread and giving up waiting after a timeout sort of works, but the thread stays there, hung, and as time goes on the process accumulates hung threads. I'd really, really like to avoid having to re-engineer my process to spawn subprocesses for each connection (especially as this is on Windows where spawning subprocesses is a bit of a pain compared to using threads).

Has anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks,
Paul

Paul Moore
Oracle DBA Support
Atos Origin UK Ltd
Daresbury Court
Runcorn

Tel: +44 (0)1928 598537

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