[thelist] (apparently) Unclosed database connections

Bruce MacKay b.mackay at massey.ac.nz
Fri Jul 18 22:20:44 CDT 2003


Hi folks,

Hope this is not too off-track.

I run a IIS server running 15 separate sites, all running the same VLE 
(virtual learning environment) ASP application.  Each site uses a separate 
Access database as its backend.

For the past 1.5 years, the system has worked flawlessly, but over the last 
4 weeks, we have started encountering faults on all the sites - database 
connections do not appear to be closing.   The end result is that any site 
function involving a database call results in an error and the site becomes 
unusable.

While we have checked the code and cannot find any page which opens a 
connection but doesn't subsequently close it, it is quite possible we have 
missed something.  As a type of shotgun approach, we are thinking of 
calling the following function at the very bottom of each page....

sub Destroy
     On error Resume Next
     If (Not (rs Is Nothing)) Then
         If (rs.State = adStateOpen) Then
             rs.Close
             set rs=nothing
         end if
     end if
     If (Not (conn Is Nothing)) Then
         If (rs.State = adStateOpen) Then
             conn.Close
             set conn=nothing
         end if
     end if
End sub

Does anyone have any other suggestions of what we might do?  Changing the 
database is not on our list - any one of our sites has only 10-15 students 
on at any given time, with 20-50 students per site per day.  Access has 
coped with this "load" without any problems thus far.  The databases are 
regularly compacted and currently range from 8-24 MB in size.

The sysop added Norton AntiVirus about 3 weeks ago - given its known 
problems with the FSO object, I had him later remove it hoping that it was 
the source of the problem - unfortunately we weren't able to restore normal 
behaviour.

If there is another list to which I should be directing this question, 
please let me know.

Cheers,

Bruce



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