How to dispose OdbcConnection while trying to connect - c#-2.0

I'm having two servers. One online and one hot-standby. I'm only writing to the online server, which is working just fine when both servers are up and running - this requires that I'm able to open a odbcconnection to both servers to check which one i online.
However if one of them is not running, when i try to open the odbcconnection it takes a long time. I've tried to make a timer event that is fired 5 seconds after trying to open an odbcconnection - if the state of the odbcconnection is still connecting I dispose the odbcconnetion. An this is here I'm stuck :(
Does one have any idea how to check if an odbcconnection is possible to open or how to dispose it if it's not able to open within X amount of time?
Thanks in advance! :)

You could open both connections asynchronously. Upon connecting successfully with one connection, dispose the other connection.

Related

EasyNetQ -- AdvancedBus reconnection

When using AdvancedBus for EasyNetQ, if the connection is broken up for any reason, how can I reconnect? Does it try to reconnect by itself?
I know IBus reconnects itself, but AdvancedBus does not seem to do that. For example, if I manually force close the connection using the web management console then the connection is gone forever. And if I recreate the IAdvancedBus again I see two new connections.

Azure server got error "system lacked sufficient buffer space or because a queue was full Ip"

i have hosted my project on azure server of Asp.net MVC, and i have used azure sql, its work fine, but number of times while performing any operation , i.e. when fire calls from controller it gives error like,
"An operation on a socket could not be performed because the system lacked sufficient buffer space or because a queue was full Ip"
and after few minutes its starts to work fine,
can anyone tell me why this error is throwing or is there any solution for this??
This is most probably client side issue (ASP.Net app side). This could happen if you do A LOT of simultaneous socket connections or do not dispose connections properly. Please double check your application and make sure that:
You properly close all database connections (use using() or call Dispose()).
You properly close any other socket connection (if any).
If your code is fine, you can try to use Transient Fault Handling App Block. It won't solve the issue itself but could help your app to workaround it.

datasnap TSocketconnection hangs

I have a Datasnap application(Delphi 7) which uses TSocketConnectiom to connect to application server. If my application stays idle for a long time after opening a clientdataset, most of the times when i want to refresh the clientdataset the application freezes without raising any exceptions.It seems that the connection is dropped and the Socketconnection is not aware of that.I am experiencing this problem very often and I am not sure where can I find the solution. Could it be a bug in TSocketconnection?
Best Regards
Firewalls sometimes drop inactive TCP connections after some time to keep their cache usage low. In this case it helps to call some server method (maybe every five minutes).
If the "setup and teardown" code for the server side DataSnap session is not to resource-consuming, you can also disconnect and reconnect the DataSnap client between all actions. This will initiate a fresh TCP connection, execute, and close it.

Best practice: Keep TCP/IP connection open or close it after each transfer?

My Server-App uses a TIdTCPServer, several Client apps use TIdTCPClients to connect to the server (all computers are in the same LAN).
Some of the clients only need to contact the server every couple of minutes, others once every second and one will do this about 20 times a second.
If I keep the connection between a Client and the Server open, I'll save the re-connect, but have to check if the connection is lost.
If I close the connection after each transfer, it has to re-connect every time, but there's no need to check if the connection is still there.
What is the best way to do this?
At which frequency of data transfers should I keep the connection open in general?
What are other advantages / disadvantages for both scenarios?
I would suggest a mix of the two. When a new connection is opened, start an idle timer for it. Whenever data is exchanged, reset the timer. If the timer elapses, close the connection (or send a command to the client asking if it wants the connection to remain open). If the connection has been closed when data needs to be sent, open a new connection and repeat. This way, less-often-used connections can be closed periodically, while more-often-used connections can stay open.
Two Cents from experiment...
My first TCP/IP client/server application was using a new connection and a new thread for each request... years ago...
Then I discovered (using ProcessExplorer) that it consummed some network resources because all closed connection are indeed not destroyed, but remain in a particular state for some time. A lot of threads were created...
I even had some connection problems with a lot of concurent requests: I didn't have enough ports on my server!
So I rewrote it, following the HTTP/1.1 scheme, and the KeepAlive feature. It's much more efficient, use a small number of threads, and ProcessExplorer likes my new server. And I never run out of port again. :)
If the client has to be shutdown, I'll use a ThreadPool to, at least, don't create a thread per client...
In short: if you can, keep your client connections alive for some minutes.
While it may be fine to connect and disconnect for an application that is active once every few minutes, the application that is communicating several times a second will see a performance boost by leaving the connection open.
Additionally, your code will be much simple if you aren't trying to constantly open, close, or diagnose an open connection. With the proper open and close logic, and SEH around your read and writes, there's no reason to test if the socket is still connected before using, just use it. It will tell you when there is a problem.
I'd lean towards keeping a single connection open in most enterprise applications. It generally will lead to cleaner code, that is easier to maintain.
/twocents
I guess it all depends on your goal and the amount of requests made on the server in a given time not to mention the available bandwidth and the hardware on the server.
You need to think for the future as well, is there any chance that in the future you will need connections to be left open? if so, then you've answered your own question.
I've implemented a chat system for a project in which ~50 people(the number is growing with each 2 months) are always connected and besides chatting it also includes data transfer, database manipulation using certain commands, etc. My implementation is keeping the connection to the server open from the application startup until the application is closed, no issues so far, however if a connection is lost for some reason it is automatically reestablished and everything continues flawlessly.
Overall I suggest you try both(keeping the connection open and closing it after it's being used) and see which fits your needs best.
Unless you are scaling to many hundreds of concurrent connections I would definitely keep it open - this is by far the better of the two options. Once you scale past hundreds into thousands of concurrent connections you may have to drop and reconnect. I have architected my entire framework around this (http://www.csinnovations.com/framework_overview.htm) since it allows me to "push" data to the client from the server whenever required. You need to write a fair bit of code to ensure that the connection is up and working (network drop-outs, timed pings, etc), but if you do this in your "framework" then your application code can be written in such a way that you can assume that the connection is always "up".
The problem is the limit of threads per application, around 1400 threads. So max 1300 clients connected at the same time +-.
When closing connections as a client the port you used will be unavailable for a while. So at high volume you’re using loads of different ports. For anything repetitive i’d keep it open.

Datasnap : Is there a way to detect connection loss globally?

I'm looking to detect local connection loss. Is there a mean to do that, as with the events on the Corelabs components ?
Thanks
EDIT:
Sorry, I'm going to try to be more specific:
I'm currently designing a prototype using datasnap 2009. So I've got a thin client, a stateless server app and a database server.
What I would be able to do is to detect and handle connection loss (internet connectivity) between the client and the server app to handle it appropriately, ie: Display an informative error message to the user or to detect a server shutdown to silently redirect on another app server.
In 2-tier I used to manage that with ODAC components, the TOraSession have some events to handle this issues.
Normally there is no event fired when a connection is broken, unless a statement is fired against the database. This is because there is no way of knowing a connection loss unless there is some sort of is-alive pinging going on.
Many frameworks check if a connection is still valid by doing a very small query against the server. Could be getting the time from a server. Especially in a connection pooling environment.
You can implement a connection checking function in your application in some of the database events (beforeexecute?). Or make a timer that checks every 10 seconds.
Spawn a thread on the client which periodically sends some RPC 'Ping' or 'Heartbeat' commands to the server.
if this fails, the client knows that something happened to the connection
if the server does not hear the client anymore for some time period (for example, two times the heartbeat interval), he can conclude that the client disconnected, however this requires a stateful server (and your design is stateless so it would require event processing in a secondary system, which could be fed through a message queue)

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