Number of concurrent Sql Server connections - asp.net

I am creating a .net application, with a Sql Server db engine. I would like my site to be accessed by thousands of users per second. What does the number of connections rely on?
How many connection can IIS hold, and Sql Server?

First, there is a difference between connections and connection pools. Is it good to look into that, as it makes a huge difference in performance. If you need a reference, I can dig one up, but google/bing is your friend here. The key takeaway is: keep the number of connections pool to a minimum.
With that said, the number of connection depends on two things.
Are you using Windows Auth? If so, every distinct user will cause a distinct connection/connection pool
If you are using SQL Auth, then each different connection string will cause a new pool to be created (even a single space difference will cause a new pool).
In regards to the scaling question, both IIS and SQL Server can handle an very high number of connections. If you are running into connection limits, you should probably take a look at the application design.
Erick

The number of connections is really dependent on the physical makeup and optimization of your server and how far you can push it. You can down-throttle the number of concurrent connections in the IIS configuration as well as in SQL if you want to put a limit on how many connections should be allowed.

That is no problem for Windows and or SQL Server:
Windows is configured by default to handle 1000 to 2000 concurrent tcpip connections.
For SQL Server, it will also depend on the licenses and or hardware which you did not specify. What kind of hardware is SQL going on ?

You can set a limit yourself, or find out what limit has already been put in place in your IIS server settings.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/b2b550de-f655-4fb6-9bed-dfc9583b6700.mspx?mfr=true

Related

Calling SqlConnection.ClearAllPools() in Application_Start & Application_End?

We are trying to diagnose an issue that occurred in our production environment last week. Long story short, the database connection pool seemed to be full of active connections from our ASP.NET 3.5 app that would not clear, even after restarting the application pool and IIS.
The senior DBA said that because the network connections occur at the operating system level, recycling the app and IIS did not sever the actual network connections, so SQL Server left the database connections to continue running, and our app was still unable to reach the database.
In looking up ways to force a database connection pool to reset, I found the static method SqlConnection.ClearAllPools(), with documentation explaining what it does, but little to nothing explaining when to call it. It seems like calling it at the beginning of Application_Start and the end of Application_End in my global.asax.cs is a good safety measure to protect the app from poisoned connection pools, though it would of course incur a performance hit on startup/shutdown times.
Is what I've described a good practice? Is there a better one? The goal is to allow a simple app restart to reset an app's mangled connection pool without having to restart the OS or the SQL Server service, which would affect many other apps.
Any guidance is much appreciated.
When a process dies, all network connection are always, always, always closed immediately. That's at the TCP level. Has nothing to do with ADO.NET and goes for all applications. Kill the browser, and all downloads stop. Kill the FTP client and all connections are closed immediately.
Also, the connection pool is per process. So clearing it when starting the app is useless because the pool is empty. Clearing it at shutdown is not necessary because all connections will (gracefully) shut down any moment.
Probably, your app is not returning connections to the pool. You must dispose of all connections after use in all cases. If you fail to do that, dangling connections will accumulate for an indefinite amount of time.
Clearing the pool does not free up dangling connections because those appear to be in use. How could ADO.NET tell that you'll never use them again? It can't.
Look at sys.dm_exec_connections to see who is holding connections open. You might increase the ADO.NET pool size as a stop-gap measure. SQL Server can take over 30k connections per instance. You'll normally never saturate that.

How many connections (Max.) can be kept in a pool..?

How does connection pooling works? i want to know that if i set max. pool size = 20 so are only 20 users able to connect to the web app. at a same time and make a transaction ? What happens to the large websites like Amazon where thousands of users log in at same time throughout the world i.e what pool size do they keep? i am not getting the core concept. I know that a connection pool keeps open connections and users reuse the open connections but i want my first question to be answered.
There is no such document where you can find the maximum size of the pool.Default value of max pool size is 100
Check out MSDN
There can be maximum 32767 connections to the database at a time. That is, at a single point of time only 32767 users can make transactions to database via web app. Not even one more than that. A pool size is not mentioned anywhere only default is there(100). But SQL Server will only accept 32767 connections from user. Proof: Select ##MAX_CONNECTIONS . If misunderstood please correct me.
The user connections option specifies the maximum number of simultaneous user connections that are allowed on an instance of SQL Server. The actual number of user connections allowed also depends on the version of SQL Server that you are using, and also the limits of your application or applications and hardware. SQL Server allows a maximum of 32,767 user connections. Because user connections is a dynamic (self-configuring) option, SQL Server adjusts the maximum number of user connections automatically as needed, up to the maximum value allowable.

ASP.NET connection pool question

Does the same connection string used on two different physical servers hosting different web applications that talk to the same database draw connections from the same connection pool? Or are pooled connections confined to at the application level?
I ask because I inherited a 7 year old .NET 1.1 web application which is riddled with in-line SQL, unclosed and undisposed sql connection and datareader objects. Recently, I was tasked to write a small web app that is hosted on another server and talks to the same database and therefore used the same database connection string. I created a LINQ object to read and write the one table required by the app. Now the original .NET 1.1 app is throwing exceptions like
"Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached."
Maybe these are unreleated, but wanted to get your opinions to make sure I cover all my bases.
Thanks!
There is no way connections can be pooled between two separate machines. Your SQL Server will have a connection limit for total connections however.
This error is most likely occurring because the application is not returning connections to the connection pool. This can happen because the connection is not being disposed of correctly. This can happen due to poor code (does it use a using block, or a try catch finally?) or if using a SQLDataReader can cause the connection to stay open after the code to execute the SQL has exited.
Connection Pools are kept in your App Pool, so it shouldn't be possible for a separate machine to steal out of a separate boxes App Pool. Have a look here for some info on the connection pool. I'd also recommend slapping the performance counters on see bottom of this article to see what's going on in there a bit more.
Also might want to check the max number of connections on SQL Server. In management Studio
Right click on the Server name --> Properties --> Connections
look for "Maximum number of concurrent connections (0 = unlimited)"

Connection Pooling on Oracle 11g w/ asp.net

What is the best way to handle connection pooling with Oracle 11g and asp.net, I'm having issues where Oracle refuses to open up any new connections for the web app after a while.
This causes the request to time out and queue up.!
EDIT:
Is there anything that I need to do in Oracle to fine tune this?
Since you didn't mention your Oracle config, its hard to tell you a first course of action, so you need to clarify how many sessions you have.
SELECT username, count(1) FROM v$session GROUP BY username;
Oracle's max is controlled by the "PROCESSES" instance parameter. The default may be something like 150. You may try bumping that to 300 or so for an OLTP web app, however, if you do have a leak, it will only delay the inevitable. But check the PROCESSES is at least as large as your "Max Pool Size" setting for your Oracle ADO connection string. Default for 11g ODP.NET is 100 I think.
Closing the connections is all you need to do. The framework should handle all of the pooling.
Querying the v$session would show all outstanding sessions.
How many connections do you have and how quickly are you trying to create/disconnect them ?
Shared servers is one mechanism to have multiple end clients share a limited number of connections.

Is more than 100 active connection to SQL server db not normal in an ASP.NET website?

While tracing the active connection on my db i found that some times the connections exceeds 100, is that normal?
and after few minutes it return back to 20 or 25 active connection
more details about my problem
Traffic on the site is around 200 visitor per day.
Why i am asking? because the default MaxPool in the asp.net connection string is 100
Also i am using Connection in the website IIS
That really depends on your site and your traffic. I've seen a site peek out at over 350 active connections to SQL during its peak time. That was for roughly 7,000 concurent web users, on two web servers, plus various backend processes.
Edit
Some additional information that we need to give you a better answer:
How many Web Processes hit your sql
server? For example are you using web
gardens? Do you have multiple servers
how many if you do? This is important because then you can calculate how many connections you can have by figuring out how many worker threads per process you have configured. Assume worse case, each thread is running which would add a connection to the pool.
Are you using connection pooling? If so your going to see the connections stick around after the user's request ends. By default its enabled.
How many concurent users do you have?
But, I think your going after this wrong, your having an issue with no free connections available in your pool. The first thing I'd look for is any leaked connections (connections being held open for longer then they should). For example passing a data reader up to the Web Page, could be a sign of this.
Next thing is to evaluate the default settings. Maybee you should run a web garden which should give you more connections, or increase the number of connections available.
The last thing I would do is try to opitmize queries like in your last question. Let's say you cut those queries in half, all you've done is bought yourself more time until more users come onto the system, and your right back here, only this time you might not be able to optimize that query yet again.
You're leaving out some details making it difficult to answer correctly but...
It depends, really. If you're not using connection pooling then each time a page is hit that requires access to the database a new connection is going to be opened. So sure, it could be perfectly normal.
I would also look into caching. Cache pages, cache query results, etc. You might be surprised how many times you go back to the database to get a list of US States...

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