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Showing posts from October, 2012

Locks held on Oracle for hours after sessions abnormally terminated by node failure

If a session holds db locks and is abnormally terminated (no fin/ack), the locks will persist until the db session is closed, typically around 2 hours and 12 minutes with default network tcp_keepalive settings. Abnormally terminated does not include CTRL C or kill -9. The ojdbc6 driver apparently has a shutdown hook thread that closes the connections in graceful shutdowns. The OS apparently closes the connections when processes are killed. Abnormally terminated might include power failure, firewall failures, Out Of Memory, OS/kernel crash, network connection failure, JBoss or other server node failure, etc. This was easily reproduced by creating a  process that connected to the db and updated a record but did not commit. While the first process was waiting, a second process with a contending update was started which blocked on the first update. The first clients network cable was then disconnected. The second clients transaction waited for approximately 2 hours until the database O