Quote Originally Posted by dbbyleo
Do killed session eventially get "cleanup"? I mean ... long after the session is killed will the session stay in the v$session view? But more importantly, how long after will the O/S processes stay. I'm assuming as long as the O/S processes are there (when I do a ps -ef), then Oracle is registering that many current process, which mean it could still be affecting the process limit parameter. if that right?
In a perfect world after rollback is complete your session would get cleanup but in our imperfect world you might find that one or both of your Oracle Session and O/S Process appears to stay there forever.

One of the possible causes for this behavior works like this... Client got abort, DBA kills Oracle session, Oracle session remains in "KILLED" status -or is gone after a while, O/S process still out there -alive and kicking.

Usually you can solve this issue by tracing back the offending O/S Process -use PID and kill -9 PID them. In normal circumstances that would take care of both your Oracle session and your O/S process.