Re: utl_smtp Hanging when opening a connection

collins.paulj_at_googlemail.com wrote:
> We are using utl_smtp to send emails from our database. We currently
> run Oracle 9.2 on RHEL4, with Postfix as our mailserver.
>
> Lately, we have noticed that the process creating the email is
> hanging, which often requires the database to be taken down to fully
> kill off the session. (This is on our test system, fortunately).
>
> Having looked at a numnber of posts on various forums, I have seen
> that this is not an uncommon problem. Oracle have included a timeout
> parameter in utl_smtp.open_connection, but this is not implemented for
> write processes (in version 9.1 to 10.2, although more may be the
> same), and from comments, I have seen that this timeout functionality
> does not apply to opening the connection itself.
>
> Has anybody come up with a solution to programmatically cause the open
> connection to timeout if a connection is not established in a
> reasonable time, and if so, can you please help me.
>
> Many thank in anticipation,
>
> Paul

Hi Paul,

I am not sure about RHEL4 but I had a similar situation a few years back on a HP box with frequent external network problems.

To reduce the impact of this I amended the servers TCP settings (I think it was tcp_ip_abort_cinterval I'm not 100% though). This caused the failed open connection attempts to close much faster which was useful for server scanning failures etc.

As always test it & gl

Regards,
Ian Received on Thu Nov 29 2007 - 15:24:15 CST