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ORA-03135: connection lost contact
- November 10, 2021
- Posted by: Ankush Thavali
- Category: Oracle DBA
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ORA-03135: connection lost contact

Cause:
1) Server unexpectedly terminated or was forced to terminate.
.
2) Server timed out the connection
Action:
1) Check if the server session was terminated.
2) Check if the timeout parameters are set properly in sqlnet.ora.
ORA-03135 occurs when we try to connect oracle database and the connection gets time out. ORA-03135 can also be caused by the firewall when connecting remotely.
To resolve ORA-03135 exception we need to increase the value of the expire_time parameter in the SQLNET.ORA file, as mentioned in Action part. We can also set the parameters sqlnet.inbound_connect_timeout and inbound_connect_timeout_listenername to 0 can avoid the ORA-03135 error. SQLNET.ORA file is located under $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/.
We recently faced ORA-03135 on one of our testing environment after Server Admin team did a firewall upgrade. Users were able connect to the database, but if their session was idle for some time, the connection was getting terminated.
To resolve ORA-03135 we added following to SQLNET.ORA file
SQLNET.EXPIRE_TIME = 10
This keeps connections alive by send a check to verify that client/server connections are active in every 10 minutes. If the probe finds a terminated connection, or a connection that is no longer in use, then it returns an error, causing the server process to exit.
ORA-03135: connection lost contact

Cause:
1) Server unexpectedly terminated or was forced to terminate.
.
2) Server timed out the connection
Action:
1) Check if the server session was terminated.
2) Check if the timeout parameters are set properly in sqlnet.ora.
ORA-03135 occurs when we try to connect oracle database and the connection gets time out. ORA-03135 can also be caused by the firewall when connecting remotely.
To resolve ORA-03135 exception we need to increase the value of the expire_time parameter in the SQLNET.ORA file, as mentioned in Action part. We can also set the parameters sqlnet.inbound_connect_timeout and inbound_connect_timeout_listenername to 0 can avoid the ORA-03135 error. SQLNET.ORA file is located under $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/.
We recently faced ORA-03135 on one of our testing environment after Server Admin team did a firewall upgrade. Users were able connect to the database, but if their session was idle for some time, the connection was getting terminated.
To resolve ORA-03135 we added following to SQLNET.ORA file
SQLNET.EXPIRE_TIME = 10