Database Connectivity issue

We have BuildMaster periodically reporting issues connecting to the SQL server database - but when we investigate, there is no issue between the two servers. Restarting the BuildMaster service from the admin tab does not reset the error, but restarting the machine does.

Based on a suggestion in this support q - http://inedo.com/support/questions/3101 - I disabled connection pooling and have not had this issue recur. However, I am wondering what the consequences of this will be - we plan to have a number of applications configured on the build server - what are the limitations if we do not have connection pooling? Is there a better way to solve this problem?

Could not connect to the BuildMaster database. BuildMaster will not function property until this is resolved. The specific error message is: Connection Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed while attempting to consume the pre-login handshake acknowledgement. This could be because the pre-login handshake failed or the server was unable to respond back in time. The duration spent while attempting to connect to this server was - [Pre-Login] initialization=28; handshake=14979;

Product: BuildMaster
Version: 4.8.6

This is fairly easy to reproduce -- just turn off the SQL Server. As to why it's happening, that's hard to say... perhaps it's being rebooted? Or you have network connectivity issues?

If this is happening, I wouldn't disable pooling --- instead, just try to restart the web app by going to, Admin > All Settings > Save. This will re-establish a connection to the service on restart, and should clear this error.

Another thing you may want to do, is to configure the service to crash on database errors; then set auto-recovery. You can do this by setting a value in your service's application configuration file, "CrashOnDbFailure" to "True", and changing the recovery settings in Windows.