Hi Pando,

Can you see the checkpoint processes are running with "ps -ef | grep ckpt" or is the instance running on a NT platform?

Can it be there is some sort of IO bottleneck for the datafiles?

Are the disks slow?

(The ARC says they are not archived (which is normal in noarchivelog mode), It doesn't state that the archiving process is not running maybe keeping the logs in an active state (with out any reason).)

Realy hope you can pinpoint your problem now.

Tycho