OC4J ping timeout issues

We recently went with a Jdev Application using Oacle Application Server 10.1.3. While the deployment went fine, a few days after the deployment we started noticing oc4j ping timeout issues in the opmn.log. After the OC4J ping timeout OC4J tries to restart itself. We checked the max heap size - the max heap size looks good. There is not much activity on the server so we feel the default ping timeout of 20 seconds should be sufficient. I don't believe it can be a JDK version issue either - since out dev/test environment does not have this issue and is on the same version. will be great to know if anybody has run into a similar issue and know of any possible solutions.