status INACTIVE

Hi
Since this morning, I have put for only onle process(Procedure). The status for this session in the V$session shows as inactive. The process (Number) as shown in v$session is 248:268, while no such pid exist if I issue
ps -ef command;

Can someone explain to me, What An Inactive session means and how to link a session to a process

Badrinath

select s.sid , s.serial#,
p.spid server_pid, s.username, s.program,
decode(s.process, NULL, s.machine, s.machine || ' PID: ' || to_char(s.process)) "MACHINE/PID" ,
s.server, s.status
from v$session s, v$process p
where s.username is not null
and s.paddr = p.addr
order by to_number(p.spid)
/

SID SVR_PID MACHINE /PID STATUS
14, 2000 , REI\6038fhgzc464 PID199:70 ,ACTIVE
16, 9205 , REI\6038fhgzc464 PID248:268 ,ACTIVE
9, 9215 , REI\6038fhgzc464 PID258:256 ,INACTIVE


What does Status Inactive mean ?
Also which id here should I check on ps -ef? is that
svr_pid (2000) or PID (199:80)
ps -ef does not list any of these pid (199,248,258)

Advise

The server_pid is the Process ID on the server. You will see this process with ps -ef. The "machine/pid" is the PID of the client process on the client machine. If you do a ps -ef on "machine", then that PID will show up.

INACTIVE means that this session is connected, but is not making any requests against the database at the moment the query was run.