Chris Beaumont writes:

Unfortunately, if what you meant was to remove the -DDCOracle8 flag from the end of my Setup file and recompile, that didn't do it. Zope is still crashing and restarting on perhaps one out of every 100 requests. It seems to be more common when it hasn't been accessed in awhile, do you think it could be some kind of cache issue? I did mean -DDCOracle8 indeed.

Are you sure, that your "_oci.c" has indeed been recompiled after your change?. Usually changes in "setup" or "Makefile" do not lead automatically to a recompilation. Our problem was a memory corruption in the Oracle "logoff" function (it has a different name, but is called during connection close). During each "close connection", this function released a block of memory that was still being used. After several such actions the system became very unstable: most of the time SIGSEGV (at different places, however, with peeks in the memory managegment functions) but sometimes infinite loops, too. Zope closes the connection, when the DA is evicted from the cache. Therefore, the problem might well be correlated with the DA objects not been used for a while. Dieter