What are Slow JDBC Connection Acquisitions?

Plumbr detects slow JDBC Connection Acquisition when JDBC connection retrieval via DataSource.getConnection() or DriverManager.getConnection() is affecting end user experience. In such case Plumbr notices this and exposes the number of transactions affected along with the wait time the transactions were forced to wait behind the connection retrieval.

Slow connection retrieval can be caused either by

• Missing connection pool. Creating JDBC connections is expensive, so in this case please consider using pooling the connections. 
• Uninitialized connection pool. In cases where pooled connections are initialized lazily, the first requests to the empty pool are slow. Consider initializing the pool during application startup.
• Under-provisioned connection pool. When the number of available connections in the pool is smaller than the demand, there will be wait time in queue for the connections. Consider increasing the pool size to match the number of concurrent requests to the data source.
• Leaking connection pool. If connections are not closed the connection pool does not know that the connection is no longer being used by the borrower thread. To fix this, add pool-specific options to pool configuration to spot leakages in pool.
• Testing connections. To avoid unused connections in pool for becoming stale, the pool implementations often test out the connection before handing it off to the executor thread. When the test query is expensive, this can result in poor performance. Consider simplifying or dropping the tests if possible.