Periodically Check And Repair Data Connections For Idle Instances On ArcGIS Server 10

A new option has been made available when publishing services on ArcGIS Server 10. This is the ability to periodically check and repair data connections for idle instances. Dependant on architecture and configuration, services could loose connections to ArcSDE or the backend database.  This new option prevents idle services from losing their connections.

When a service instance sits idle, it can be difficult for a server administrator to determine if connections to the source data are being successfully maintained. ArcGIS Server has built-in mechanisms to check for invalid connections to ArcSDE geodatabases. These checks prevent your service from appearing unresponsive after a connection to ArcSDE is dropped or interrupted.

By checking the checkbox, ArcGIS Server will automatically run data connection validity checks at the specified interval. This can be very useful if you have firewalls between your ArcGIS Server and ArcSDE or backend database server. Some firewalls tend to close connections when there are idle connections after a certain period of time and this can disrupt your ArcGIS Server services.

ArcGIS Server already performs checks on busy services to validate and repair data connections. After every 5 minutes, the next request received by a service results in a check. You can change the interval or disable this behavior by adding the ConnectionCheckInterval tag to the <Properties> section of the service configuration file.

While ArcGIS Server already performs checks on busy services, ConnectionCheckInterval cannot validate data connections on idle services so this new option is very useful.