Corrupted dll problem 1

[jen89]

I have a major problem on my test and production servers with a particular application. The application is set up with an application layer and a data access layer. The data access layer uses the Oracle managed provider (System.data.OracleClient?)

Every so often (about once a week, sometimes less, sometimes more), something happends to the DAL. The application will work but database connectivity will be lost. The actual database is not down, but the application cannot access it through the data access layer.

The problem can be fixed by overwriting the dal.dll with a fresh copy of the dll, so it seems that the dll is somehow being corrupted? I am unable to reproduce the error or tie it to any particular event that I can identify. This is a major problem as it completely disables the application.

Has anyone run into anything like this before? Any ideas, however farfetched, would be appreciated. I would also appreciate any suggestions on search terms that I might be able to google to research this. I have tried things like "corrupted dll," with no luck, but I'm not even sure if that is what is happening. Thanks in advance for any ideas or suggestions.

 

[jen89]

Any ideas? We are live now, and this is a major problem! Even if you could help me figure out something new to google, I would really appreciate it!

 

[dragonwell]

My guess is the dll is not getting corrupted. Something else is going on, most likely a resource contention (maybe a database connection not being closed?) or full connection pool due to improper disposal.

Have you tried changing the web.config file for the application? Just a small change, say add a carriage return, and then save it - effectively restarting the application. If doing that fixes it, it means just restarting the application (which is what happens when you replace the dll) releases the locked up resources, or fixes whatever has crashed.

Also, I have no expreiece with the Oracle provider. Maybe there's a bug in that...

HTH

Greetings,
Dragonwell

 

[jen89]

ok, thank you so much for the tip! I have been suspecting that it might be something with the connection pool. I will try the change with the web config, and see if I can confirm that this is the problem. I really appreciate you responding - clearly there was something wrong, but I haven't even known where to search. Thanks for the direction