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Sukhpinder Singh
Sukhpinder Singh

Posted on • Originally published at singhsukhpinder.Medium

Connection Leak in MSSQL

The error occurs as a result of connection leaks in the application.

Any applications getting connection timeouts to MS-SQL Server will see the following error.

Message=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 the max pool size was reached.
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Most of the time, this failure happens due to connection leaks in the application. Run the following query to check the list of connection requests in the MSSQL Server:

select count(1) conection_count, program_name, host_name, status, host_process_id from sys.dm_exec_sessions where is_user_process = 1 group by program_name, host_name, status, host_process_id order by 1 desc
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The connection requests are of two categories.

  • running

  • sleeping

The above query returns a list of connections, i.e., both running and sleeping.

Currently, in the above output, I don’t have any sleeping thread.

But by default, ADO.Net in C# application sets a max pool size to 100 connections per “host_process_id.” So if a process is holding up more than 100 sleeping connections, there is a possibility it might leak.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you liked the article. Please provide your feedback in the comment section.

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