Connection Pool Exhausted

Diagnose connection pool saturation.

A saturated connection pool means all available connections to the DB or Redis are in use. New requests wait or fail. It's often a symptom of leaks or slow queries.

Symptoms

  • "Connection pool exhausted" errors
  • Timeout on DB queries
  • Performance that degrades under load
  • Connections stuck in "Sleep"

Common Causes

  • Unclosed connections: Code opens connections without releasing them.
  • Long queries: Slow queries monopolize connections.
  • Pool too small: Max connection count is insufficient for the load.

Diagnostic Steps

  1. Check active connections (SHOW PROCESSLIST)
  2. Identify connections in Sleep for a long time
  3. Examine long queries
  4. Check pool configuration in the application

Automate with MoniTao

MoniTao detects saturation effects:

  • Alerts on degraded response times
  • Detection of connection-related 500 errors
  • History to correlate with traffic

Best Practices

  • Use connections with timeout and idle timeout
  • Always close connections (finally, using)
  • Size the pool according to expected traffic
  • Monitor active connection count

FAQ

What size for the pool?

Depends on your load. Start at 10-20 and adjust based on metrics.

How to detect connection leaks?

Connections in Sleep for a long time indicate leaks.

MySQL max_connections sufficient?

Must be >= sum of all your app pools + margin.

Can MoniTao monitor the pool?

Not directly, but response times reveal problems.

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