Java BoneCP MySQL connection timing out

Question

I have an application set up to pool mysql connections with BoneCP. Right now, the application isn't getting a ton of use, so the connections aren't used as frequently. After a certain amount of time, queries that once worked, start to fail, and I get messages similar to this:

com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.CommunicationsException: Communications link failure

The last packet successfully received from the server was 2,618,063 milliseconds ago.      The last packet sent successfully to the server was 44,734 milliseconds ago.
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Unknown Source)
at com.mysql.jdbc.Util.handleNewInstance(Util.java:411)
at com.mysql.jdbc.SQLError.createCommunicationsException(SQLError.java:1117)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.reuseAndReadPacket(MysqlIO.java:3567)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.reuseAndReadPacket(MysqlIO.java:3456)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.checkErrorPacket(MysqlIO.java:3997)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.sendCommand(MysqlIO.java:2468)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.sqlQueryDirect(MysqlIO.java:2629)
at com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.execSQL(ConnectionImpl.java:2719)
at com.mysql.jdbc.PreparedStatement.executeInternal(PreparedStatement.java:2155)
at com.mysql.jdbc.PreparedStatement.execute(PreparedStatement.java:1379)
at com.jolbox.bonecp.PreparedStatementHandle.execute(PreparedStatementHandle.java:138)

I am setting up BoneCP like this:

BoneCPConfig config = new BoneCPConfig();
config.setJdbcUrl("jdbc:mysql://" + hostname + "/" + database);
config.setUsername(username); 
config.setPassword(password);
config.setMinConnectionsPerPartition(minPoolSize);
config.setMaxConnectionsPerPartition(maxPoolSize);
config.setIdleConnectionTestPeriodInMinutes(60);
config.setIdleMaxAgeInMinutes(240);
config.setPartitionCount(1);
connectionPool = new BoneCP(config);

I'm unsure of how to find out what the timeout is for the mysql server (it hasn't been changed from whatever the default is), but I get this error after around 5 or 10 mins of no connection pool activity, which seems extremely short.

Answer 1

Either you'll have to configure mysqls idle timeout (setting wait_timeout = X / interactive_timeout = X), or you could configure the connection pool to issue keep-alive statements:

config.setIdleConnectionTestPeriodInMinutes(10);
config.setConnectionTestStatement("/* ping */ SELECT 1"):