Strange DB connection count increase

[Cantor, Scott]

On 12/19/13, 3:42 AM, "Chris Wellings" <cwellings at rm.com> wrote:

>I¹m trying to investigate an issue we saw the other day when our
>Shibboleth session database suddenly had a large amount of database
>connections . Usually we see about 10-30 connections in a 5 minute period
>but this increased to over 700 connections in a five minute period (for
>about an hour we had an average of  100 connections per minute.)

I don't think the database was working, since the connections were all
apparently failing. If it can't connect, or has to reconnect, then instead
of pooled connections at a stable level, you'll get a lot of individual
attempts to connect that all fail, or at least don't work once the
connection is made.

> Any ideas what this was? We think the problem was solved by deleting all
>the session data from the tables. The logs don¹t really show anything
>strange
> before the amount of connections took us over the threshold of allowed
>connections except:
> 
>ERROR Shibboleth.LogoutInitiator.Local [72]: error accessing current
>session: ODBC StorageService failed to set transaction isolation level.

That's your database or the driver not honoring a basic ODBC call.

-- Scott