using netstat -tln | wc -l I see over 9,000 listening ports on one of my DB servers.
On another DB server the same command shows 4500 listening ports. Both DB servers are running Oracle.

Why so many listening ports and why the huge difference in two servers both serving the same function. Any ideas? TIA!!!!

I doubt that you really need 9000 ports unless you run a really popular db, maybe one of the apps is forgetting to close the connection after use.

Run netstat -tlnp and see if it's oracle or lsnrctl.

Thanks for the reply. I had ice issues yesterday and lost the internet.

Indeed we know we do not need all those ports. I've built 6 servers all from a kickstart network install. Exactly the same. Yet one of the servers only had 39 open ports while the others have 4k or 3 of them have 9k. All doing the same function running an oracle DB.

Thanks for your suggestion, Running with the -p shows a - (dash) in the pid field 99% of the time. A few pid's show up but for the most part it is blank. Is this a clue that something is not closing the port after the process has died?

You need to run netstat as root or else it won't show you the pids of the processes that you don't have access to.

I am running it as root. Suspicion is that these are zombie processes that are not being killed off properly. We've found some CLOSE_WAIT processes still listening waiting for the ack that whatever was being closed indeed closed. But that is only a small percentage and I've added a variable to sys.config that should fix that issue.

I think we have a memory overflow or something going on but I can't figure out what the heck it is.

How many listener processes do you see if you do a:
netstat -tlnp | wc -l

On most servers I see 27 or 35. But I'm seeing 9000+ on some servers.

Any ideas why?

On my computer, ubuntu 8.10, 22 ports

You can run "tcpdump -i eth0 -nl" to see which which computer requested those ports to be opened or run...

while sleep 1; netstat -tlnp >>/tmp/listen.log; done

To get a continuous dump of the netstat. Take a look at the ports that are still opened at the end and search for them in the listen log to see which app had opened it.

Good stuff Niknah .... I'm just now getting back to this issue. I'll work with what you posted and reply with the output info.
Thanks!