I recently wrote a couple of sql-scripts which had to run on all of my customer’s DBs. The sql-scripts had to be started from a Linux-client, which does not have any Oracle client software installed. So I thought of using sqlcl (see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sqlcl/downloads/index.html), because there is no need to “install” something then. All I needed was an installed JRE on the Linux-machine. Fortunately that was available. So I downloaded the newest version of sqlcl and unzipped it. Initially I had an issue with the timezone when connecting:


ORA-00604: error occurred at recursive SQL level 1
ORA-01882: timezone region not found

I could workaround this by adding “AddVMOption -Doracle.jdbc.timezoneAsRegion=false” in <sqlcl-home>/bin/sql:


#
# set up the main arguments for java.
#
function setupArgs {
...
AddVMOption -Doracle.jdbc.timezoneAsRegion=false
....

When looping over the databases the connect-times suddenly became very slow. I had to wait for up to 2 minutes to setup a connection to the database. After doing strace on the sqlcl-connects I saw the reason for the slow connects:

The Oracle JDBC driver requires a random number for encrypting the connect string. By default this random number is generated from /dev/random. If the number of entropy-entries (cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail) becomes too low, the access to /dev/random is blocked until enough entropy-entries are available again. The number of entropy-entries is generated through some random noise on the machine (drivers for keyboard, mouse, network, etc. generate the entries). If there is no driver-activity then the entropy-pool may become empty.

The workaround is to
– either artificially generate some driver load (examples on how to do it are in referenced links at the end of the blog)
– or use /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random

The first workaround was not feasible in my case. So I had to use the more unsecure workaround of using /dev/urandom. I.e. I updated <sqlcl-home>/bin/sql again and added “AddVMOption -Djava.security.egd=file:///dev/urandom”:


#
# set up the main arguments for java.
#
function setupArgs {
...
AddVMOption -Djava.security.egd=file:///dev/urandom
....

Afterwards my sqlcl-connects were fast again.

See the following links for more info:

http://www.usn-it.de/index.php/2009/02/20/oracle-11g-jdbc-driver-hangs-blocked-by-devrandom-entropy-pool-empty
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2327220/oracle-jdbc-intermittent-connection-issue
https://oraganism.wordpress.com/2015/09/20/slow-jdbc-connections-strace-and-random-numbers
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/database-appliance/documentation/oda-eval-comparing-performance-1895230.pdf –> see page 7: “Specify non-blocking random number generators”

Remark: I updated the Oracle Community entry https://community.oracle.com/thread/4073170 with that information as well.