keep a continuous mongo connection active using pymongo

Question

I have a consumer reading from kafka which has a continuous stream of events, every so often I have to write to a mongo collection for which I have to have a continuous mongo connection open. My solution to this which is fairly hacky I feel is to re-initialize the connection every 5 minutes or so to avoid Network timeout. This is to avoid periods in which there are no events from kafka and the connection is idle.

Can anyone suggest a better way to do this? Since I'm pretty sure this is the wrong way to go about establishing a continuous connection to mongo.

I'm using the pymongo client.

I have a MongoAdapter class which has helper methods:

    from pymongo import MongoClient
    import pymongo
    import time

    class MongoAdapter:
        def __init__(self,databaseName,userid,password,host):
            self.databaseName=databaseName
            self.userid=userid
            self.password=password
            self.host=host
            self.connection=MongoClient(host=self.host,maxPoolSize=100,socketTimeoutMS=1000,connectTimeoutMS=1000)
            self.getDatabase()
        def getDatabase(self):
            try:
                if(self.connection[self.databaseName].authenticate(self.userid,self.password)):
                print "authenticated true"
                self.database=self.connection[self.databaseName]
            except pymongo.errors.OperationFailure:
                print "Error: Please check Database Name, UserId,Password"

and I use the class in the following way to re-connect:

   adapter_reinit_threshold=300   #every 300 seconds, instantiate new mongo conn.
   adapter_config_time=time.time()
   while True
       if (time.time()-adapter_config_time) > adapter_reinit_threshold:
            adapter=MongoAdapter(config.db_name,config.db_user,config.db_password,config.db_host)   #re-connect
            adapter_config_time=time.time()   #update adapter_config_time

The reason I went ahead and did it this way was because I thought the old unused objects (with open connections, would be garbage collected and connections closed). Although this method works fine, I want to know if there's a cleaner way to do it and what the pitfalls of this approach might be.

Answer 1

From the documentation of pymongo.mongo_client.MongoClient

If an operation fails because of a network error, ConnectionFailure is raised and the client reconnects in the background. Application code should handle this exception (recognizing that the operation failed) and then continue to execute.

I don't think you need to implement your own re-connection method.