Monday, December 11, 2017

ORA-00240: control file enqueue held for more than 120 seconds 12c

Occasionally, In Oracle 12c database, you may get ORA-00240: control file enqueue held for more than 120 seconds  error in the alert log file.


Well, as this error contains the word control file so it looks scary but if you are getting it infrequently and the instance stays up and running then there is no need to worry and this can be ignored as a fleeting glitch.

But if it starts happening too often and worst case if it hangs or crashes the instance then more than likely its  a bug and you need to apply either the latest PSU or any one-off patch available from Oracle support after raising SR.

There have been some occurances where this error occured due to high number of sessions and conflicting with the ulimit of the operating system resulting in hanging of ASM and RDBMS. Some time it could be due to shared pool latch contention as per few MOS documents.

So if its rare, then ignore it and move on with the life as there are other plenty of things to worry about. If its frequent and a show-stopper then by all means raise a SEV-1 SR with Oracle support as soon as possible.

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