When my MongoDB connection is idle for a few minutes, the next request ends in error. From the mongo
command line client, it looks like this:
> db.users.find()
Sat Jan 12 23:42:35 Socket recv() errno:54 Connection reset by peer 107.22.25.25:47207
Sat Jan 12 23:42:35 SocketException: remote: 107.22.25.25:47207 error: 9001 socket exception [1] server [107.22.25.25:47207]
Sat Jan 12 23:42:35 DBClientCursor::init call() failed
Sat Jan 12 23:42:35 query failed : chowology.users {} to: ds047207.mongolab.com:47207
Error: error doing query: failed
Sat Jan 12 23:42:35 trying reconnect to ds047207.mongolab.com:47207
Sat Jan 12 23:42:35 reconnect ds047207.mongolab.com:47207 ok
I see the problem against sandbox instances of MongoHQ and MongoLab.
The next request goes through fine, because of the reconnect. This is a problem in my web app, because after a few minutes of inactivity, this error will come up during a web request. There are two things that surprise me:
- That MongoDB connections are destroyed so regularly and frequently, and
- That the driver simply raises an exception as opposed to automatically retrying after reconnecting (I'm using connect-mongo which uses mongoose which, in turn, uses node-mongodb-native).
Is this everyone else's experience? How is this supposed to be handled? I'd be surprised if app developers wrap their database operations in some retry-exception-handling nonsense.
You want to look at the docs for the Server object
http://mongodb.github.com/node-mongodb-native/api-generated/server.html#server
Especially the socketOptions where you can set keepAlive and the connection timeouts. By default keepalive is off and timeout is 0 or never which means the os default socket timeout is in effect (varies from os to os). Keep alive will send a packet once in awhile down the tcp socket connection to keep it alive. Sometimes firewalls are badly configured and don't send an end packet when they close a connection leaving the connection dead and in limbo which is what the monoglabs people are talking about (more often than not to be honest they are horribly configured).
- Check that your computer isn't going to sleep
- Check that your router/firewall is not killing idle connections
The first problem turned out to be my computer sleeping and dropping the network connection unknowingly. It's a new computer and I didn't realize I hadn't disabled the sleep :-P
Jared from MongoLab helped me troubleshoot this and I'm thankful for it. He said this behavior is common when going through a firewall (as mjhm suggested in his comment). So one test would be to bypass that.
Still going through my router, I get a different error after several hours idle:
db.users.find()
Sun Jan 13 14:55:02 Socket say send() errno:32 Broken pipe 107.22.25.25:47207
Error: 9001 socket exception [2] server [107.22.25.25:47207]
Sun Jan 13 14:55:02 trying reconnect to ds047207.mongolab.com:47207
Sun Jan 13 14:55:02 reconnect ds047207.mongolab.com:47207 ok
I'll try it again from a server that doesn't go through my router/firewall.
The behavior of the driver raising the exception on the current op is expected and acceptable since a dropped connections is truly an exceptional case.
Update: Neither of these problems occur when I bypass my router, nor do they occur in my Nodejitsu instance, which I believe runs in a Joyent data center.
I had the same problem and I think it's because I'm accessing the internet behind a proxy server