In most cases connection pooling problems are related to connection leaks. Your application probably doesn't close its database connections correctly and consistently. When you leave connections open, they remain blocked until the .NET garbage collector closes them for you by calling their Finalize()
method.
You want to make sure that you are really closing the connection. For example the following code will cause a connection leak, if the code between .Open
and Close
throws an exception:
var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString);
connection.Open();
// some code
connection.Close();
The correct way would be this:
var connection = new SqlConnection(ConnectionString);
try
{
connection.Open();
someCall (connection);
}
finally
{
connection.Close();
}
or
using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
{
connection.Open();
someCall(connection);
}
When your function returns a connection from a class method make sure you cache it locally and call its Close
method. You'll leak a connection using this code for example:
var command = new OleDbCommand(someUpdateQuery, getConnection());
result = command.ExecuteNonQuery();
connection().Close();
The connection returned from the first call to getConnection()
is not being closed. Instead of closing your connection, this line creates a new one and tries to close it.
If you use SqlDataReader
or a OleDbDataReader
, close them. Even though closing the connection itself seems to do the trick, put in the extra effort to close your data reader objects explicitly when you use them.
This article "Why Does a Connection Pool Overflow?" from MSDN/SQL Magazine explains a lot of details and suggests some debugging strategies:
- Run
sp_who
or sp_who2
. These system stored procedures return information from the sysprocesses
system table that shows the status of and information about all working processes. Generally, you'll see one server process ID (SPID) per connection. If you named your connection by using the Application Name argument in the connection string, your working connections will be easy to find.
- Use SQL Server Profiler with the SQLProfiler
TSQL_Replay
template to trace open connections. If you're familiar with Profiler, this method is easier than polling by using sp_who.
- Use the Performance Monitor to monitor the pools and connections. I discuss this method in a moment.
- Monitor performance counters in code. You can monitor the health of your connection pool and the number of established connections by using routines to extract the counters or by using the new .NET PerformanceCounter controls.
Best Answer
You are not posting some of the most important information about what you are doing. The fact that it is a webmethod is a red-herring, it simply comes down to a database issue and how much you are hammering it.
It would seem that you might have a connectivity issue here, as the exception states (and I don't believe it has anything to do with the pool). Are you getting this when trying to open the connection, or when trying to execute the operation? Each one has a separate timeout, so it might be a good idea to explicitly open the connection and then make the call to the operation, so you can see where the timeout is occuring.
Also, I would look to see if you are using transactions. If this is encompassed in a connection, and the timeout is on the operation, and you are using transactions, then are you using transactions to access this table anywhere else (read or write) that is wrapped in a transaction? It might be a deadlock at that point.
Barring all that, if that is not the case, then it's a connectivity issue and you have to look to see if the machine and server are configured correctly (are you using tcp ip, named pipes, or shared memory, for example) for database operations.