Sniped sessions and ora-00020: maximum number of processes (%s) exceeded 2011-03-23

When you implement the resource limit, the sessions that exceed the IDLE limit is marked as SNIPED in V$SESSION view and you may get “ORA-00020: maximum number of processes (%s) exceeded” error because Oracle doesn’t kill that session in OS level and it assumes it as a “process”. So for this, you need to kill those sessions manually.

This Document shows a little demonstration of the whole process: – First of all, set the RESOURCE_LIMIT parameter to TRUE to enforce the resource limit in database profiles