Question

I was wondering if anyone knows how to set up connection pooling for Sitecore 6 running on SQLServer 2005 ?

And is this a good idea to setup on a Sitecore solution? Or probably more correct, will there be any problems if setup incorrectly?

Any other comments or tips about this are also greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The answers from Sitecores support:

By default, connection pooling is
enabled in ADO.NET (it means that we
don’t need any connection string
parameters to enable it, parameters
are needed only to disable or to tune
the connection pooling). Thats why
there are no connection pooling
parameters in the default connection
strings. For more information please
refer to the following MSDN articles:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.sqlclient.sqlconnection.connectionstring.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8xx3tyca.aspx

If you wish to tune the Database
Connection Pooling, you can add
appropriate parameters to the
connection strings.

Second reply after I asked some more about it:

Please see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8xx3tyca%28v=vs.80%29.aspx

When a connection is first opened, a
connection pool is created based on an
exact matching algorithm that
associates the pool with the
connection string in the connection.
If MinPoolSize is either not specified
in the connection string or is
specified as zero, the connections in
the pool will be closed after a period
of inactivity. However, if the
specified MinPoolSize is greater than
zero, the connection pool is not
destroyed until the AppDomain is
unloaded and the process ends.
Maintenance of inactive or empty pools
involves minimal system overhead.

Following connection strings
parameters can be applied.

# Max Pool Size – specifies the
maximum size of your connection pool.
Default is 100. Most Web sites do not
use more than 40 connections under the
heaviest load but it depends on how
long your database operations take to
complete. # Min Pool Size – initial
number of connections that will be
added to the pool upon its creation.
Default is zero; however, you may
chose to set this to a small number
such as 5 if your application needs
consistent response times even after
it was idle for hours. In this case
the first user requests won’t have to
wait for those database connections to
establish. # Pooling – controls if
your connection pooling on or off.
Default as you may’ve guessed is true.

I hope this helps others.