SQL & PL/SQL

Hi All

Client Server
Debian Lenny
Instant client 10.2
SQL Plus 10.2
Latest Apache/PHP and OCI

ORACLE Server
Win 2003 + Oracle 8.x

On the client server I can connect to the Oracle server through php and execute all kinds of queries that do not fetch a lot of data. But once the data being fetched is more than roughly 100kbyte nothing seems to happen anymore, a tcpdump only shows acks being sent from the client to the server.

Example:

select * from table where rownumber < x "x is 1 to 45" <-- This returns the result correctly in a second

select * from table where rownumber < y "y is 46 and up" <-- This query simply keeps hanging, no time out nothing, if executed from command line it hands if executed in the browser it just keeps loading. If tcpdump is launched to monitor it, after the first two seconds all that happens is that the client sends acks to the server.

However, if I use sqlplus 10.2 on the same Debian server, I can execute
select * from table, and all 16000 rows are fetched and displayed in the sqlplus console.

I really dont know what the problem is and what to look for here. Is the data being returned back to the client in SQL Plus in a differnet fashion than in OCI ? What could be the problem ? Can I use SQL plus through PHP ? I.e. in a similar fashion, like get rows as results and not some piped data ?

Any hints are appreciated.

Regards