intermittent Oracle session explosion

I've got a situation where a user (the application) is randomly maxing the available sessions for no apparent reason. Someone will start the application or be doing something in the application and all of a sudden the number of sessions assigned to the individual will start to multiply at the rate of two to three per second until the max sessions is reached. These sessions will remain open until they are timed out. They never show as active. And of course, with no sessions available, everyone else is blocked from using the application.

The application is Visual Basic against an Oracle release 10 server. We have tried to make this happen, but it's totally random as to when it occurs. The way the application is constructed it does not maintain an open connection to the server. That is, when it needs data it opens a connection, gets the data and closes the connection. The app traps any Oracle errors and attempts to write them to the database. The only error we've gotten that might be related to the event is a TNSListener error. "Listener failed to start a dedicated process."

I should also mention that this is a recent development for an application and server that have been behaving just fine for months.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Chris Received on Tue Sep 26 2006 - 11:37:46 CDT