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Getting Connection timeout error when application is idle

when ever I keep my application idle for 10 or 15 hours, I will get Connection time out error. But when I frequently use my application then I couldn't able to see this error any time. Could any one please guide me whether I am making some thing wrong in the below code. This application is used by only two users and that too be not frequently.
<Context path="/****" reloadable="true">
<Resource
name="XXXX"
type="javax.sql.DataSource"
username="XXXX"
password="XXXX"
driverClassName="com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver"
maxIdle="4"
maxWait="30000"
initialSize="2"
url="jdbc:sqlserver://localhost;database=XXXX"
maxActive="20"/>
</Context>

Unfortunately there is not so much information given in your example. Assumed that is a small piece of a Spring (Spring Framework) context configuration, i would prefer to configure a connection pooling for the database. This pool can hold an amount of idle connections for each request an can open new ones if no connection is available in the pool for the current request. I found this piece of XML in the MySql documentation.
<bean id="dataSource" destroy-method="close"
class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource">
<property name="driverClassName" value="${db.driver}"/>
<property name="url" value="${db.jdbcurl}"/>
<property name="username" value="${db.username}"/>
<property name="password" value="${db.password}"/>
<property name="initialSize" value="3"/>
</bean>
Please be aware that the datasource is of type org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource. For further information please refer to the Documentation of MySql, Spring Framework and DBCP

Based on information provided on question, i can see:
Most probably, application is not properly handling connection i.e. it is creating connection, but then somehow failed to close connection properly in application code.
As per question, if only 2 users are using this app then probably you might not able to catch connection exhausted error which usually thrown when connection pool reaches max limit.
But if you increase app users you will see your connection reached max limit very quickly.
Check number of connections that got created after application starts and observe behavior. Check if inactive connections are getting closed or not.
Also, I don't see inactive connection timeout property in configuration. Can you check if you have this property.

This is an issue with databases, it gets shutdown/locked up after a long idle period. In MySQL it is 8 hours by default. You have to use a connection pooling library like C3P0 which has configuration to talk to database and turn on the connection if it is closed.
It is possible to increase the timeout amount in databases, but not recommended. Therefor go for a system like I mentioned above which can turn on the connection for you.

Connection pool C3P0 logging

I have a web application that uses c3p0 as the connection pool. we use hibernate as the orm tool.
Recently, we have been getting connection timeout exceptions. To debug these exception, i enabled the logging fro C3p0 and got some information in logs. Can anybody help me in making complete sense out of it.
DEBUG 2012-08-05 14:43:52,590 [com.mchange.v2.async.ThreadPoolAsynchronousRunner$PoolThread-#0] com.mchange.v2.c3p0.stmt.GooGooStatementCache: checkinAll(): com.mchange.v2.c3p0.stmt.GlobalMaxOnlyStatementCache stats -- total size: 2; checked out: 0; num connections: 1; num keys: 2
from the above, i can observe that the total size of the connection pool is 2. No. of checked out connections are 0. Is this right? And what are num_connections and num keys in the above?
Thanks..

What you are seeing in the bit of log that you've quoted is a snapshot of the Statement cache, not the Connection pool. There were two cached PreparedStatements, which belonged to a single Connection, at the time that message was logged. Neither of the Statements was checked out/in use.
I hope this helps!

The exceptions might be due to incorrectly defining the C3P0 settings. Ensure that you link to the right jar file Your application must be linked to "hibernate-c3p0*.jar" and not to "c3p0*.jar". The hibernate.cfg file must have the hibernate.connection.provider_class property defined in order for the c3p0 settings to take effect. Below is a sample settings
<property name="hibernate.connection.provider_class"> org.hibernate.connection.C3P0ConnectionProvider </property>
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.min_size">5</property>
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_size">10</property>
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.timeout">300</property>
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_statements">50</property>
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.idle_test_period">3000</property>
The log entry specifies that there are 4 connections in the pool and all the 4 connections are available for the application to use. Running a query towards your database to list all the active connections will show the pool connections. For eg in Mysql you could run "show processlist;" to see these connections.

EclipseLink permanent connection

I have a project that uses EclipseLink 2.1.3 under Tomcat 7.
What's bugging me is that the connection to the server doesn't persist through all of the app's life.
For a ServerSession to start I have to access the application manually.
Is there a way to automatically start a ServerSession when the application deploys and keep it running at all times ? So that I can access the application after a long idle time without having to wait ?
Thank you!
EDIT:
I have the following lines in persistence.xml
<property name="eclipselink.jdbc.read-connections.min" value="5"/>
<property name="eclipselink.jdbc.read-connections.max" value="10"/>
<property name="eclipselink.jdbc.write-connections.min" value="6"/>
<property name="eclipselink.jdbc.write-connections.max" value="12"/>

Server applications usually use a JDBC connection pool to get connections and reuse them. Depending on the pool you use, you may configure it to keep a given number of connections open.

jdbc4 CommunicationsException

I have a machine running a java app talking to a mysql instance running on the same instance. the app
uses jdbc4 drivers from mysql. I keep getting com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.CommunicationsException
at random times.
Here is the whole message.
Could not open JDBC Connection for transaction; nested exception is
com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.CommunicationsException: The last packet successfully received from the server was25899 milliseconds ago.The last packet sent successfully to the server was 25899 milliseconds ago, which is longer than the server configured value of 'wait_timeout'. You should consider either expiring and/or testing connection validity before use in your application, increasing the server configured values for client timeouts, or using the Connector/J connection property 'autoReconnect=true' to avoid this problem.
For mysql, the value of global 'wait_timeout' and 'interactive_timeout' is set to 3600 seconds and 'connect_timeout' is set to 60 secs. the wait timeout value is much higher than the 26 secs(25899 msecs). mentioned in the exception trace.
I use dbcp for connection pooling and here is spring bean config for the datasource.
<bean id="dataSource" destroy-method="close" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource" >
<property name="driverClassName" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
<property name="url" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/db"/>
<property name="username" value="xxx"/>
<property name="password" value="xxx" />
<property name="poolPreparedStatements" value="false" />
<property name="maxActive" value="3" />
<property name="maxIdle" value="3" />
</bean>
Any idea why this could be happening? Will using c3p0 solve the problem ?

Try setting up the Apache Commons DBCP correctly.
You need to set:
validationQuery to SELECT 1+1
testOnBorrow to true
That should fix the problem.

Can you describe how your app is handling connection pooling? I doubt that autoReconnect=true in the JDBC driver would re-pool connections from your app. The app needs to reconnect when it loses a connection.

I'd follow the advice in the exception. You should consider either:
expiring and/or testing connection validity before use in your application,
increasing the server configured values for client timeouts, or
using the Connector/J connection property 'autoReconnect=true' to avoid this problem. Try adding that to your connection URL (consult the docs for the exact syntax) and see if it helps.
I doubt that C3P0 will be that much better than the DBCP that you're already using. The exception is giving you some specific advice. You've tried #3. What about the other two?
I know how to ask WebLogic to check connections before using them. You should find out how to do the same with Tomcat.

I have seen before that Windows machines which have been moved on the network have had trouble with connecting to themselves.
Is there any connectivity problems outside the JVM - i.e. mysql client connecting to the server, and timing out, etc?

Hibernate/mysql connection pooling

We host a service (servlet running on jboss), which receives something like 5-6 requests per second. Every request needs to connect to mysql through hibernate. Most of our requests do selects, with an insert/update every 5th/6th request. The hibernate mysql connection gets timed out after mysql connection time out period (8 hours). Even after having a request pinging our service, every hour, the mysql connection sometimes gets randomly disconnected after a day or so. We want hibernate to reconnect in case the connection is disconnected due to any reason, and maintain the number of connections we want it to.
We tried C3P0, with the following configuration:
<property name=c3p0.acquire_increment>1</property>
<property name=c3p0.idle_test_period>3600</property>
<property name=c3p0.max_statements>0</property>
<property name=c3p0.min_size>1</property>
<property name=c3p0.timeout>3605</property>
<property name=hibernate.c3p0.preferredTestQuery>select 1;</property>
Hibernate connection_pool size was set to 1.
This made the timeout/disconnect problem go away. But we started facing another problem. Long waits. Normally the request serve time for us is 2-3ms for select and 40-50ms for insert/update. But, after using the above C3P0 configuration, we saw that every request completing after an update was taking more than a minute and sometimes even 4-5 minutes! From our logs, it seemed that randomly a select request would get stuck and will be able to complete only after an update request was received and served.
Above problem goes away if we remove the C3P0 config. Can somebody suggest what we might be doing wrong?
Here is the complete hibernate config for reference:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC
"-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration DTD 3.0//EN"
"http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd">
<hibernate-configuration>
<session-factory>
<property name="connection.driver_class">com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</property>
<property name="connection.url">jdbc:mysql://xxx.xxx.xxx</property>
<property name="connection.username">xxx</property>
<property name="connection.password">xxx</property>
<property name="connection.pool_size">1</property>
<property name="dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect</property>
<property name="current_session_context_class">thread</property>
<property name="hibernate.cache.use_query_cache">false</property>
<property name="hibernate.cache.use_second_level_cache">false</property>
<property name="show_sql">true</property>
<!-- Transaction isolation 2 = READ_COMMITTED -->
<property name="connection.isolation">2</property>
<property name="connection.autocommit">true</property>
<!-- configuration pool via c3p0-->
<property name="c3p0.acquire_increment">1</property>
<property name="c3p0.idle_test_period">3600</property> <!-- seconds -->
<property name="c3p0.max_size">1</property>
<property name="c3p0.max_statements">0</property>
<property name="c3p0.min_size">1</property>
<property name="c3p0.timeout">3605</property> <!-- seconds -->
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.preferredTestQuery">select 1;</property>
</session-factory>
</hibernate-configuration>

I'd recommend abandoning C3P0 and using the JNDI naming service and connection pooling that JBOSS provides.
Be sure that you are closing connections properly and returning them to the pool. Connect, query, close, all in the narrowest scope possible. No connection should be hanging around for eight hours.
Some more links might be pertinent: http://www.hibernate.org/117.html and http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=353736&seqNum=4 regarding Hibernate and closing connections, and this MySQL bug that cites problems with MySQL, Hibernate, and connections: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=10917

Something seems amiss with your configuration. All configuration parameters should be in the hibernate.c3p0 namespace, not c3p0.*.
But that's probably not the problem. I think most likely your pool is only one connection big and you are experiencing resource contention issues somewhere. Most likely not releasing a connection where you should, or a deadlock on some data. Try setting maxPoolsize to something higher, like 2 and see if the problem is mitigated any. This would probably mean you're not properly returning connections.

The JBoss Hibernate documentation specifically states to not use the Hibernate connection-pool manager for non-production systems (just like Hypersonic - I really don't know why they bother to ship known buggy components). As was previously commented, use the standard JBoss <datasource> setup and associated pool-manager (and configure as needed).
Where there is some misunderstanding is that the open() and close() methods are overridden by the connection manager. Even the Connection object isn't a direct connection to the database but rather a handle to the pool-manager.
The implementation upon getting a new connection (aka open) is to request a connection from the pool (which for efficiency is already opened and, if configured using the <prepared-statement-cache-size> property in the datasource definition, also has previous PreparedStatements still bound to that Connection). This call is uber efficient.
When close() is called on the Connection (again, implemented by the pool-manager), the connection reference state is simply changed to 'available' versus closing the actual database connection. This is also uber efficient. Therefore it is recommended that the smallest possible scope of open/exec/close calls be made to maximize multi-thread use of available connections in the pool.