Jeff,

thanks for the answer,

First , how do I know it is a listener problem? yes, there are lots of connections showing on listener.log. Is there any log file that would show connections are being dropped to the floor by the server? would tracing on the client help to prove or disprove this?

>>I'd configure multiple listeners and load balance between the two (or three, or four).

how is that done? is this what is refered in the net guide manual as "Connection Load Balancing"? their examples use 2 servers; do you have en example using one DB server?

Regarding "shared servers", I have received advice in the past that it can actually lower performance than the standard configuarion. do you have any data/stats on shared server agaisnt dedicated server?

the DB server is set to handle only 450 processes now. it is getting close to this limit and I was thinking of incremanting it anyway