DB_PING_TIMEOUT Value Change
Recently we have discovered that a newer setting for on-premise (licensed) Adobe Connect servers may lead to a memory leak on the system in certain rare circumstances. Here is some history and recommendations in case you believe you may be running into a memory leak problem in your Adobe Connect licensed environment and you are running a version newer than 9.0.3.
The DB_PING_TIMEOUT value was introduced back in Connect 7 (2008 timeframe). It enables invalidated DB connections to be recognized quickly. In the absence of a reasonable value for this timeout, we have had instances in the past where critical CPS threads (e.g. the scheduler sweeper thread) have waited on a stale DB connection for too long, causing fastfails. This value had since always been set to ‘0’ which means there is no time out. Since the default host health check time out value is 40 seconds, it is recommended that the DB_PING_TIMEOUT default value be set to 30 seconds, so that it is under the limit that causes potential server fast-fails. This was a fairly minor change in the config.ini, where the DB_PING_TIMEOUT value was changed from 0 to 30. This was done at the Connect 9.0.3 version. So every version above 9.0.3 will have the default set to 30. [Important note – this value is in seconds, not milliseconds]
Recent longevity tests in version 9.2 suggested that this might be triggering a memory leak in the driver. The going theory for why that behavior wasn’t seen in previous longevity tests (between 9.0.3 and 9.2) is that we only upgraded to JRE 7 in 9.2. So the setting we were running with previously suddenly seemed to be a problem once we also upgraded to 1.7.
That value of 30 was introduced for a reason, so we don’t suggest turning it off without knowing that it causes a problem. On the Adobe hosted clusters, we have made the decision to do so since there were signs of memory issues even previously and we didn’t want to compound that.
That said, there are known issues with our driver and JRE 1.7, but only under some circumstances. In the case of Adobe Connect system administrators observing (continuous) increases in heap memory usage, this parameter value should be set back to 0.
This can be done by changing this value either in the config.ini from 30 to 0 (DB_PING_TIMEOUT=0) or by adding this value in the custom.ini (it won’t be there by default, but if you add it, it will take precedence over what is in the config.ini)