Some questions about connection pooling in a servlet application

Question

I'm new to java in web application design and I'm getting surprised how many things I don't now.
In particular I'm having problems in understending how servlet containers manage resources like connection pooling classes.

Assuming that I choose a pooling library (let's say c3p0), I read that there are many ways to use and manage the connection pooling classes.

For instance in many examples I saw that a certain class (let's say ComboPooledDataSource) is instantiated in the init() method of the servlet and here I'm getting a bit confusing. I mean, I think that a connection pooling system must exist and have a separate life with respect to all the servlets that will need a connection, otherwise it make no sense. So I think that the class below may be a Thread that is started once from the first servlet that call the init method and then it continues to exist until someone doesn not interrupt it. Is that correct? If not how does it work?

Anyway once I start this class , is it shared among all the servlets in the context (I mean all the servlets that call it in the init method)?

Other examples set up the connection pooling system as a resource by for instance defining it in the context.xml and then any servlet that want a connection just have to access it via JNDI (JNDI is correct?). What i understood (or I think to) is that in this case the thread that will execute the pooling system is started when the application is started and each servlet can access it when it wants to. Is that correct?

In this case can I modify the connection pooling system properties by a servlet or a background thread runtime? (for example if I want to change the number of connections as a function of the statistics on the number of requests and so on)

If I want to create different pools (for example I want to subdivide the database access to N different databases or I want to access using different usernames ) do I need to create as many resources as are the different kind of connection I want?

Is there a "better" way among these two or they are equivalent?

Answer 1

It comes down to ease of use of the webapp and (Tomcat) server maintenance.
You describe 2 use cases:

1. a connection pool used by one webapp
2. a connection pool shared between webapps

The first case is suitable for "ease of use": you can drop the war-file in any Tomcat server and it will work (eg Jenkins delivers such a war-file) since the webapp contains all the code needed to access a database. No need to change the configuration of the Tomcat server and restart it.
If I can, I like to deliver these kind of war-files since less things can go wrong (eg no clashes with configuration for other webapps). You can take it a step further by delivering Tomcat embedded with an application (so you don't need a Tomcat server to start with, an example project is here ).

Note that opening a database connection pool (preferably via ServletContextListener.contextInitialized , not a servlet) and closing it (via contextDestroyed ) does not involve starting and stopping a thread. The pool implementation may decide to start a background thread (eg to remove idle and/or abandoned connections), but it does not have to.

The second case is suitable for several webapps that share a common ground. For example, if several webapps all running in the same Tomcat server all use the same database, it saves time and effort if the Tomcat server already has a connection pool available for the different webapps (via JNDI). The Tomcat server can contain the JDBC driver software and connection pool software in the "lib" directory and configuration is done once in the context.xml of the server. If the database changes or different (patched) software components are required, only the tomcat server needs to be updated and all the webapps can remain the same. In this case, updating the Tomcat server instead of each webapp is a lot easier.

The second case is also more suitable for monitoring: there is a good chance you can monitor the connection pool via JMX. This kind of monitoring may not be available in the first case.

Changing "the number of connections as a function of the statistics on the number of requests " is not needed with connection pools: you set a maximum amount of connections to use and a timeout to remove idle connections. The connection pool will then grow and shrink with the number of requests.

Subdividing the database access to N different databases would require a different connection pool for each database, unless this is "read-only" in which case you could also use a load-balancer.

Access using different usernames is a bit tricky. I read in another question (which I cannot find anymore, sorry) that you can change the schema during runtime, but changing username/password might require a new connection in which case connection pooling is out.

Answer 2

Are you using Tomcat to run your servlets? Tomcat 7 has a new pooling solution that you could investigate. Tomcat also includes the dbcp libraries you can use them by setting the factory="org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSourceFactory". The DBCP pools are self managed and you can define the configuration values in the context.xml file I am not aware of how to change these values on the fly. I believe the Tomcat 7 pool use the same configuration as the DBCP with a couple of added options to make the conversion between the two simple. We use DBCP in all our applications and have not experienced problems so I have not used the Tomcat 7 pooling. I am thinking you would need to create many pools to handle most of your requirements.