Issue with Connection Pooling in ias 8i

Question

We keep running out of connections on a regular basis. We have checked out the JSP code and we are closing the connections at the end of every JSP, which I think should return the connections back to the Pool. The max process from the database side has already been set to the maximum value. How can we check if the connections are being returned back to the pool or not. Is this a problem that has patch of a fix in 9i ?
Thanks
Venkat

Answer 1

Java exception mechanism makes it very hard to write exception-safe code so that the connections are returned to the pool if something goes wrong.
try {
Connection conn = ...
Statement stmt = conn.createStatement();
ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery(..);
rs..
rs..
stmt.close();
conn.close();
} catch(SQLException ex) {}
for example the above code is not exception safe. If there is an error while you are working with the resultset, the connection remains open. Instead :
Connection conn = null;
Statement stmt = null;
ResultSet rs = null;
try {
conn = ...
stmt = conn.createStatement();
rs = stmt.execute...
}catch(SQLException ex){}
finally{
try{
if(rs!=null) rs.close();
}catch(SQLException){}
try{
if(stmt!=null) stmt.close();
}catch(SQLException){}
try{
if(conn!=null) conn.close();
catch(SQLException){}
You see how stupid the code gets to make it exception safe. I think we can put the blame on the close() methods throwing an SQLException. What can you do if close() fails really. To my mind it is very stupid.