Ever since I heard Tanel Poder talk about application servers causing positive feedback loops (performance gets worse -> open more sessions -> make performance even worse) in Riga 2012 LVOUG conference, I was curios to see one myself. And recently I got a chance to see a very interesting variety of such behavior.
On the plot above you can see database CPU usage (red line) versus time, plotted together with the number of sessions running same SQL statement (identically the same, i.e. not even different binds — there are no binds in this statement). There is a clear correlation between the two. Apparently, when database performance degrades to a certain point, the application server is not getting the answer fast enough, and launches the query again in another session, thus degrading performance even more, etc.
This behavior is very dangerous and may easily cause prolonged outages (see the plateau towards the right side of the plot — the database server was maxed out in terms of CPU for over 24 hours!).
Moral of the story: don’t spawn more sessions in response to poor performance, unless you want poor performance to quickly become terrible!
Oracle Diagnostician 