Inactive connections piling up

Question

We have a Web based application which accesses an Oracle 9.2.0.5 DB the same dsn/user/password is used to connect and connection pooling is enabled. Recently we have seen the number of connections grow to as many as 60 for the user. They are marked inactive but don't seem to get "cleaned up". As we walk through our programs against a test database we see the connections being opened and closed on the server without problems. Any ideas as to why connections would remain though we pair up each connect with a close?

Answer 1

First, just so we're clear, an INACTIVE session is merely a session that is not running a SQL statement at that instant. In an OLTP application, most sessions may be INACTIVE 90+% of the time, since they are waiting on user input.
Second, a connection will stay open until the client closes it. Unless the client has closed the session, it will not disappear.
If you are using connection pooling, a close() statement in your application merely returns the connection to the connection pool. If you are using ODBC, the ODBC Driver Manager will generally keep the connections open for at least a couple of minutes to see if another open() request comes through. If it does, the existing connection will be used to satisfy this new request. For this reason, you would expect that closing a connection from the application wouldn't close the physical database connection. Over time though, the number of simultaneous client sessions should roughly match the number of physical connections.
Justin
Distributed Database Consulting, Inc.
http://www.ddbcinc.com/askDDBC