Firewall timing out connections in Pool - Commons DBCP

[O. Ziggy]

I am using the Commons DBCP connection pool to manage my connections. Everything works fine but recently i found out that every morning i try to make a request, the application takes at least 9 minutes to process the request. Subsequent requests take just seconds.

I have tried to trace this and found out that since i set the connection pool to keep at least two connections alive, the next day i try to make a connection these two connections are reused. The problem is there is a firewall which resets every connection after every hour.

So the problem is the firewall is invalidating the connections and its taking my application too long to find out that a connection has been reset before it creates a new one.

I could try and re-write the DBCP connection pool to send "keep alives" but i dont think this is wise as how will i know which connection to send the keep alive for?

Does anyone have any idea how i can solve this? Or is there a setting on DBCP that will do this for me?

Here are my default values on the pool

 
pool = new GenericObjectPool(null);
((GenericObjectPool)pool).setMaxActive (Integer.valueOf(prop.getStringProperty("WebFHL.maxconn","20")).intValue());
((GenericObjectPool)pool).setMaxWait (1000 * Integer.valueOf(prop.getStringProperty("WebFHL.maxconn","20")).intValue()); // 20 secs
((GenericObjectPool)pool).setWhenExhaustedAction(GenericObjectPool.WHEN_EXHAUSTED_FAIL);
//---((GenericObjectPool)pool).setMinEvictableIdleTimeMillis(30000); //Evictor runs every 30 secs.
((GenericObjectPool)pool).setMaxIdle(2); // Maximum idle threads.
                   
   

[dema rogatkin]

We had a similar problem, so we set life time for a connection to 30 minutes. However we use a home made pool. I noticed that WL connection pool gives the same level of control, even better. So check documentation for your connection pool, it's common problem and should be covered by settings.