Why we need Weblogic Inactive Connection Timeout - database-connection

If a connection is 'inactive' I guess the Weblogic internal data source manager should recover the connection. Why should 'Inactive Connection Timeout' be a configurable parameter. Is there any use case which requires WL to wait for certain period before an inactive connection is recovered?
Thanks in advance.

This variation could occur depending on what downstream systems are doing, or where a system is sometimes under load and not able to respond in an adequate period of time

A leaked connection is a connection that was not properly returned to the connection pool in the data source. To automatically recover leaked connections, you can specify a value for Inactive Connection Timeout on the JDBC Data Source. ( Configuration: Connection Pool page in the Administration Console.) When you set a value for Inactive Connection Timeout, WebLogic Server forcibly returns a connection to the data source when there is no activity on a reserved connection for the number of seconds that you specify. When set to 0 (the default value), this feature is turned off.

After digging into this.. specific to question "Why should it be configurable..", because by default this feature is turned off, you can turn it on if you believe that the application for some reason is not returning connections back to the pool, i.e.
leaking connections. Depending on the application use cases and the amount of resource leakage, one could set the duration. IOW, you don't want to timeout connections too quickly, because it will force the app server to have to recreate those on next need or cause unnecessary errors. But if the application is leaking a lot of connections, then you can tighten the duration so it keeps cleaning up.

Related

What's the meaning of expiry timeout in Activemq PooledConnectionFactory?

I don't understand the application of expiryTimeout field in Activemq PooledConnectionFactory. The java doc said "allow connections to expire, irrespective of load or idle time. This is useful with failover to force a reconnect from the pool, to reestablish load balancing or use of the master post recovery". please give me an example, a real scenario which expiryTimeout field effect in it.
The expiry timeout option is a bit of a legacy feature of the Pool that isn't all that useful in most applications these days. The way it works is that if you configure an expiration time then the Connection that is loaned out and is later closed will be completely closed and dropped should there be no other active users of the Connection, otherwise it stays alive until all active instances are closed, then the underlying Connection object is closed.
This works slightly differently than the Idle timeout which applies to Connection instances that are sitting unused in the pool and are closed after some length of time to release resources on the Broker side.
These days you are better off using a failover URI in the PooledConnectionFactory with broker support for rebalance of cluster clients enabled which would then dynamically redistribute the load in the broker cluster as opposed to the expiry timeout which only closes down Connection instances once everyone that is currently actively using them has released them by calling close on them.

TCP/IP long-term connections

I have a server application which runs on a Linux machine. I can connect this application from Windows/Linux machines and can send/recieve data. After a few hours, something occurs and I get following error on the client side.
On Windows: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host
On Linux: Connection timed out
I have made a search on the web and found some posts which suggest to increase/decrease OS's keep alive time. However, it didin't work for me.
Can I found a soultion to this problem or should I simply try to reconnect to the server when the connection is forcibly closed?
EDIT: I have tracked the situation. I sent a data to the remote node and sent another data after waiting 5 hours. Sending side sent the first data, but whet the sender sent the second data it didn't response. TCP/IP stack of the sender repeated this 5 times by incrementing the times between retries. Finally, sender reset the connection. I can't be sure why this is happening (Maybe because of a firewall or NAT - see Section 2.4) but I applied two different approach to solve this problem:
Use TCP/IP keep alive using setsockopt (Section 4.2)
Make an application level keep alive. This is more reliable since the first approach is OS related.
It depends on what your application is supposed to do. A little more information and perhaps the code you use for listening and handling connections could be of help.
Regardless, technically a longer keep alive time, should prevent the OS from cutting you off. So perhaps it is something else causing the trouble.
Such a thing could be router malfunction or traffic causing your keep-alive packet to get lost.
If you aren't already testing it on a LAN (without heavy trafic) I suggest doing so.
It might also be due to how your socket is handled (which I can't determine from your question)
This article might help.
Non blocking socket with timeout
I'm not used to how connections are handled on Linux, but I expect the OS won't cut off a connection unnecessary.
You can re-establish connection as a recovery, but you need to take into account that not all disconnects are gentle, and therefore you could end up making recovery on a connection you actually wish to be closed.
Since it is TCP, it will do its best to make a gentle disconnect, but you can send a custom message telling the server or client not to re-establish the connection right before disconnecting. That way you be absolutely sure, despite that it should be unnecessary to do so.

How do I keep Advantage Database connections from timing out?

I have a Windows Service that works with an advantage database and occasionally makes some http calls. On rare occasions these calls can be very long. To the tune that my database connection times out. I'm not using a Data Module or anything. Just creating the connection manually.
My primary question is what usually prevents the connection from timing out if I just haven't used it in a while? Do the TAdsComponents send a keep alive message that gets called in the background somehow? Is that dependent on the vcl so I don't have that in my service? Somehow I feel like creating a thread to make my http call, and in the main thread checking for it to finish every few seconds would prevent the connection from dying. Is that ever true?
Yes, there is a keepalive mechanism as you expect. The client (for all communication types, TCP, UDP, Shared memory) sends a "ping" to the server every so often to let the server know that connection is still alive. The frequency of that keepalive ping is based on the server configuration parameter CLIENT_TIMEOUT. With the default settings, I believe the keepalive ping is sent every 30 seconds.
The keepalive logic runs in a separate thread that is started by the code that handles the communication. In other words, it does not depend on any of the VCL components; if you have a connection to the server, then that thread should be running.
One way to check if your connections are timing out is to look in the Advantage error log. There should be 7020 errors corresponding to timed out connections.
Some things that come to mind that might result in timed out connections include:
The client process being suspended for some reason so that the keepalive thread could not run. This seems unlikely.
The keepalive thread was killed for some reason. This also seems unlikely; you would have to go out of your way to make this happen.
A firewall may close the connection if there is no activity for a time. I would think, though, that a 30 second interval would be sufficient to prevent that.
A firewall may disallow the UDP keepalive packets. Firewalls, by nature, are "suspicious" of UDP packets. You might make sure you are using TCP/IP.

Which strategy about connection management should we use when developing an application?

Which use of connection management is better while developing a windows based application which uses a Database as its data store? What about web-based applications?
when user loads the first form of an application, the global
connection opens and on closing the last form of the application
the connection closes and disposes.
for each form within the application, there is a local connection
(form scope) and when user wants to perform an operation like
insert, update, delete, search, ... the application uses the
connection and by unloading the form the connection also closes and
disposes.
for every operation within a form of an application, there is a
local connection (procedure scope) and when user wants to perform
an operation like insert, update, delete, search, ... the
application uses procedure connection and at the end of every
procedure within the form, the connection also closes and disposes.
Go with #3
You should try to only ever keep connections open for just as long as is required.
Also have a look at
Understanding Connection Pooling
SQL Server Connection Pooling
(ADO.NET)
Connecting to a database server
typically consists of several
time-consuming steps. A physical
channel such as a socket or a named
pipe must be established, the initial
handshake with the server must occur,
the connection string information must
be parsed, the connection must be
authenticated by the server, checks
must be run for enlisting in the
current transaction, and so on.
In practice, most applications use
only one or a few different
configurations for connections. This
means that during application
execution, many identical connections
will be repeatedly opened and closed.
To minimize the cost of opening
connections, ADO.NET uses an
optimization technique called
connection pooling.
Connection pooling reduces the number
of times that new connections must be
opened. The pooler maintains ownership
of the physical connection. It manages
connections by keeping alive a set of
active connections for each given
connection configuration. Whenever a
user calls Open on a connection, the
pooler looks for an available
connection in the pool. If a pooled
connection is available, it returns it
to the caller instead of opening a new
connection. When the application calls
Close on the connection, the pooler
returns it to the pooled set of active
connections instead of closing it.
Once the connection is returned to the
pool, it is ready to be reused on the
next Open call.
This is quite a broad question. But usually, for any database server and application environment, opening and keeping a new connection is an expensive operation. That's why you definitely don't want to open multiple connections from a single client, and should stick to process-scope for connections.
In a desktop application using a database server, strategy for handling it's single connection depends a lot on the DB usage pattern. Say, if the app reads or writes something a lot within 5 minutes, and then just does nothing with the DB for hours, it makes no sense to keep the connection open all the time (assuming there are many other clients). You may introduce some kind of time-out for closing a connection.
The Web server situation depends a lot on the used technology. Say, in PHP every request is a "fresh start" WRT database connection. You open and close a connection for each mouse click. While popular Java application servers have DB connections pool, reusing the same connection instances for many HTTP request handling threads.

difference between shareable and unshareable connection in jdbc connection pool?

We notice something strange in our struts web application which was hosted on sun app server enterprise edition 8.1.
The NumConnUsed for Monitoring of JDBC resources stays at 100 over connections even though there was relatively very low user activities.
I try to do some research and found the following links
http://j2ee-performance.blogspot.com/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0506_johnsen/0506_johnsen.html
"When the application closes a shareable connection, the connection is not truly closed, nor is it returned to the free pool. Rather, it remains in the Shared connection pool, ready for another request within the same LTC for a connection to the same resource."
Base on the above comments, it is true that if my web.xml resource ref scope is set to shareable, when application side close conneciton, it remains in the shared conneciton pool thus the numconnused is always so high?
If I interpret the links in my own special way (;)), the shared vs. unshared connections is based on different connections in the same page.
java.sql.Connection connectionOne = DriverManager.getConnection(...);
...
java.sql.Connection connectionTwo = DriverManager.getConnection(...);
These two, at a glance, seem to be individual - but if your AS is set to shareable connections, the second one will be created with a pointer to the first connection instead of returning a new connection. When the page finishes the connection should be sent back to the pool.
The AS is probably keeping the pool filled with connections to enhance performance.
This is not fact, only my own iterpretation of the links.

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