intermittent failure of ocilogon

nadeemajl

Hi,

I am trying to get a web application deployed on a the following configuration

RHEL 4
PHP 5
Apache 2
Oracle 10g instant client -- Connecting to oracle 8i server

The application runs succesfully on a windows xp machine with a similar config,
but refuses to run succesfully on the above mentioned config and there are
intermitent failures realted to database connection .
The OCI interface call (OCILogon('username','password','DB_SID') )to connect to
the database seems to be failing intermittently, and the logs show the following
error on failure
The service name specified is not defined correctly in the TNSNAMES.ORA file.

This happens intermittenly , ie., it may login successfully for the first time ,
but on the second or third or some nth request to the web server , the call fails.

The very nature of such failure is maddening :mad: , as the failure are intermittent
and dont seem to have any pattern associated with them.

any help on the above issue is much appreciated.

thanks
nadeem

LordShryku

Quite odd....

Well, my first guess would be that the tnsnames.ora file is in a strange place, and the script is somehow loosing the location variable. Mind telling me where this file is and the enviroment variables you have setup in relation to oracle? Also, are you using any sort of putenv statements before initializing the connection?

Sxooter

I have the same problem. Running the file again usually works. I've been thinking of coding up a work around, but it's not a real big issue for now. We only read from the oracle database for a few reports we generate.

nadeemajl

That could not be the problem as all the env vars are properly setup , ie.,
ORACLE_HOME,TNS_ADMIN,ORACLE_BASE are set and have appropriate values. The point is a simple script that does not do any putenv calls is also not working, and the failure of the abve nature keeps occuring.

Sxooter

I've got the Settings. On mine the apache process is throwing a sig11. I'm guessing some bug in the php-oracle interface, possibly an apache related issue even.

I know that if you've got two sets of libs installed that do the same stuff it can cause apache / php to crash. It could be any of a dozen extensions I've got compiled in, and I can't compile and run without them in the real environment to find out which ones. Well, maybe I coul d leave out MySQL. My machine's not running any db apps hitting that. sigh. I've tried the latest PHP 5.0 series and Oracle instant client.

But M@tt's problem may well be something else, or what you're mentioning. I've never had a problem with my putenvs. They're all there. That part was surprisingly easy to do.

M@tt, did any of this help you? Are your apache processes throwing a sig 11 like mine?

nadeemajl

Well it seems that the culprit could be oracle 10g instant client ,
I installed an older cleint (version 8.1.7) and rebuilt php all calls seem to work.
May be it was the way I compiled the oracle 10g client with php but I am pretty
damn sure that its the client that has the problem.
For what its worth here are some of the links to posts that talk abt the problem
similar to this, I dont know how helpfull these can be but none of the remedies
mentioned here worked for me.

http://groups.google.co.in/group/ph...c99a64251c9e8a5
http://ora-12154.ora-code.com/msg/22919.html
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thr...ssageID=1095785

hth
nadeem.

Sxooter

Are you getting anything in your apache logs during this?

nadeemajl

Nope , the logs did not show any seg faults.

Sxooter

well. I'm not sure then. Might you be running out of memory?

nadeemajl

System has plenty of memory.

Sxooter

Process memory. PHP has memory limiting by default... If you run out of that you might have a script just seem to stop.

nadeemajl

Are you talking about the parameter memory_limit in php.ini, that is set to 16M, should this not be plenty ?

Sxooter

Should be, but if you've got really big return set, it might overflow it if you're not using a cursor. not sure what all you're doing. I'd make sure that error messages are turned on so you can see what's causing this.