sometime back we had this issue on a production dataserver - user connections had maxed out. users were not able to login to the dataserver. neither were DBAs.
most of the connections were actually application connections. but the users said they were not able to terminate them.
with dataserver -X we were able to identify some spids/processes. but not able to kill any spid to free up user connections.
finally we had to kill the dataserver unix processes and restart the dataserver to open it up for access. not a good solution on a production server.
are there other options?
appreciate the feedback/insights.