Database hangs during shutdown immediate

I'm running two production Oracle 8.0.6 DBs on a COMPAQ proliant 7000 server with NT 4.0 sp3.
Ram: 1GB
Processors: 2 Pentium II 500 mhz

My problem is:

I had been performing a cold backup every night and every few days (perhaps 3 - 4 times a month one
DB would hang during the shutdown immediate process without any entry in the alert_log to
give a clue as to WHY!

To recover from this, I had to either reboot the server or more recently I used
TLIST to find which Oracel80.exe process corresponds to the crashed database and terminate it.
Then I can start the database normally...

I experimented with using Oradim80 and svrmgr30 in my shutdown process to see if one or the other could be the culprit, but the freeze has occurred with both.

I tried changing my Temporary Tablespace from type "temporary" and "permanent" to no avail...

We were having this problem with Oracle 8.0.5 which was getting obsolete so I upgraded to 8.0.6 in hopes it
 might resolve this problem... it didn't. ( The two applications I support are packages which interface with
 each other and one has not been certified on 8i. The interface uses DBLINKS and so I'm forced to maintain
the two databases at the same Oracle version.)

At one point I decided to try rebooting the NT server once a week, to eliminate any potential memory leaks etc. this also didn't have any impact on the problem...

I queried just before shutdown for any active sessions which could be causing the database to wait...
but have found none.

My Oracle support has not been able to supply a solution besides "reboot the server when the problem occurs"

At that point, I decided to give up trying for a bit and switch to hot backups during the week...

My question:

Has anyone else experienced a similar problem to mine? Any idea what causes it? How did you resolve it?
(Please don't tell me anything about doing shutdown aborts on a regular basis... lol ) Received on Sat Jul 21 2001 - 16:25:52 CDT