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Connection Pool Overview

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This document describes how to use a connection pool to manage connections between applications and MongoDB instances.

What is a Connection Pool?

Definition

A connection pool is a cache of open, ready-to-use database connections maintained by the driver. Your application can seamlessly get connections from the pool, perform operations, and return connections back to the pool. Connection pools are thread-safe.

Benefits of a Connection Pool

A connection pool helps reduce application latency and the number of times new connections are created.

A connection pool creates connections at startup. Applications do not need to manually return connections to the pool. Instead, connections return to the pool automatically.

Some connections are active and some are inactive but available. If your application requests a connection and there’s an available connection in the pool, a new connection does not need to be created.

Create and Use a Connection Pool

Use an Instance of your Driver's MongoClient Object

Most drivers provide an object of type MongoClient.

Use one MongoClient instance per application unless the application is connecting to many separate clusters. Each MongoClient instance manages its own connection pool to the MongoDB cluster or node specified when the MongoClient is created. MongoClient objects are thread-safe in most drivers.

Note

Store your MongoClient instance in a place that is globally accessible by your application.

Authentication

To use a connection pool with LDAP, see LDAP Connection Pool Behavior.

Sharded Cluster Connection Pooling

mongos routers have connection pools for each node in the cluster. The availability of connections to individual nodes within a sharded cluster affects latency. Operations must wait for a connection to be established.

Connection Pool Configuration Settings

To configure the connection pool, set the options:

  • through the MongoDB URI,

  • programmatically when building the MongoClient instance, or

  • in your application framework's configuration files.

Settings

SettingDescription
maxPoolSizeMaximum number of connections opened in the pool. When the connection pool reaches the maximum number of connections, new connections wait up until to the value of waitQueueTimeoutMS.
Default: 100
minPoolSizeMinimum number of connections opened in the pool. The value of minPoolSize must be less than the value of maxPoolSize.
Default: 0
connectTimeoutMSMost drivers default to never time out. Some versions of the Java drivers (for example, version 3.7) default to 10.
Default: 0 for most drivers. See your driver documentation.
socketTimeoutMSNumber of milliseconds to wait before timeout on a TCP connection.
Do not use socketTimeoutMS as a mechanism for preventing long-running server operations.
Setting low socket timeouts may result in operations that error before the server responds.
Default: 0, which means no timeout. See your driver documentation.
maxIdleTimeMSThe maximum number of milliseconds that a connection can remain idle in the pool before being removed and closed.
Default: See your driver documentation.
waitQueueTimeoutMSMaximum wait time in milliseconds that a can thread wait for a connection to become available. A value of 0 means there is no limit.
Default: 0. See your driver documentation.
ShardingTaskExecutorPoolMinSizeMinimum number of outbound connections each TaskExecutor connection pool can open to any given mongod instance.
Default: 1. See ShardingTaskExecutorPoolMinSize.
Parameter only applies to sharded deployments.
ShardingTaskExecutorPoolMinSizeForConfigServersOptional override for ShardingTaskExecutorPoolMinSize to set the minimum number of outbound connections each TaskExecutor connection pool can open to a configuration server.
When set to:
  • -1, ShardingTaskExecutorPoolMinSize is used. This is the default.
  • an integer value greater than -1, overrides the minimum number of outbound connections each TaskExecutor connection pool can open to a configuration server.
Parameter only applies to sharded deployments.
Default: -1
New in version 6.0.
ShardingTaskExecutorPoolMaxSizeMaximum number of outbound connections each TaskExecutor connection pool can open to any given mongod instance.
Default: 2 64 - 1. See ShardingTaskExecutorPoolMaxSize.
Parameter only applies to sharded deployments.
ShardingTaskExecutorPoolMaxSizeForConfigServersOptional override for ShardingTaskExecutorPoolMaxSize to set the maximum number of outbound connections each TaskExecutor connection pool can open to a configuration server.
When set to:
  • -1, ShardingTaskExecutorPoolMaxSize is used. This is the default.
  • an integer value greater than -1, overrides the maximum number of outbound connections each TaskExecutor connection pool can open to a configuration server.
Parameter only applies to sharded deployments.
Default: -1
New in version 6.0.