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    ORA-00020: maximum number of processes (%s) exceeded - LDAP

    • Article Type: General
    • Product: Aleph
    • Product Version: 20, 21, 22, 23

    Description:
    We were getting this "ORA-00020: maximum number of processes (%s) exceeded" running a report. I looked this error up in the Knowledge Base and walked through the steps detailed there. (KB# 16384-176970)

    The Oracle spfile which shows we have 150 processes.

    1. ran ps -eaf | grep -c oraclealeph0 which shows 122 processes (aleph0 is our db name)
    2. ran ps -eaf | grep -v http | grep -c a18_1 which shows 180
    ran ps -eaf | grep -v http | grep a18_1 without the -c to see what the process names were and saw that many of them had LDAP in the name
    3. ran ps -eaf | grep -v http | grep -c ldap which turned up 68 processes

    Seeing that many ldap processes seems strange and I know of no way to "shut them down" as was suggested for sip2 in the knowledge base example.

    How to proceed?

    Resolution:
    I found 68 ldap processes for /exlibris/aleph/a18_1/alephm/source/authen/authen_ldap.pl

    The site killed the ldap processes which temporarily corrected the problem, but then they appeared again later in the day.

    Site discovered that the LDAP server was not responding.

    Site found that one of its campuses was running classes in which all the students log on to the OPAC and check their account.

    So the problem is that the LDAP authentication process (/exlibris/aleph/a18_1/alephm/source/authen/authen_ldap.pl) is not timing out when the LDAP server fails to respond.

    See also Article 000022411 (KB 130) ("Number of Oracle processes exceeded")


    • Article last edited: 2/19/2014