Re: connection dropping

> Hello,
> I love pgAdmin III. I use it when working at home. I'm stuck with II at
> work since my machine is W98, although it (II)has a feature I prefer
> over III. Anyway, here on the homefront, I'm connected via high-speed
> cable connection (1.5 meg). I get excellent performance, however, I find
> that pgAdmin drops the DB connection rather quickly if there is no
> activity. If I leave the interface for any amount of time, when I come
> back and click on anything, I get the error message:
> "An error has occurred:
>
> server closed the connection unexpectedly
>     This probably means the server terminated abnormally before of while
> processing the request."
>
> After this I usually have to click through many dialog boxes telling me
> that there is no connection to the server.
>
> If I look at the process list in the DB server, I can see all the
> connections I have made over a period just sitting there 'idle'.
> There is nothing in the log that corresponds with the drop that I can
> tell except with the possibility of:
> LOG:  pq_recvbuf: recv() failed: Connection reset by peer
> ,but these may be from other clients.
>
> What can I do to maintain the connection even if its idle?
>

I don't know how much help I can be, but I'll see if I can give you some
suggestions, or things to look at, to at least isolate the problem.

Do you experience this with other applications?  I.e., if you open a ssh
connection to a server, and leave it sitting for a while, does the session
close/timeout?

The odds are good that the problem here is that a router or firewall (most
likely a firewall) between you and the database server is killing your
connection, but not telling the server about it.  This happens quite a bit
to me behind NAT'ing firewalls.  OTOH, behind my NAT'ing linksys cable
router at home, my connections never time out, even if I leave them up for
days.

We've had the discussion before about adding support to pgAdmin3 for
trying to keep connections alive through bad firewalls, but we've come to
the conclusion that there isn't a "good" way to do this in the
application, and that these sort of network problems are better solved by
the end-user, not the application, since they are likely to affect lots of
applications, not just pgAdmin3.

If you can provide me some further information about your network setup,
maybe I can give you some suggestions for trying to fix it that way.

ahp