Shimon Krokhmal's blog

A friend calls me earlier today(and wakes me up), with a problem on a system that he is maintaining.
since the customer needed the system ASAP, he asked me to deal with it .

So, what is the problem ?

getting in to the system, wins the happy user with this error message :

8007000e System resource exceeded
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '8007000e'
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] System resource exceeded.

needless to say that is an "ASP-Access" system.

lets review all our facts :

• The system written in ASP
• The system's database is Access
• It deployed on a shared hosting server
• the system sends some error message - probably DB related

after googling a while, got the answer that the problem is connection pooling related.
this could mean one of two things :

1. There are places in the system which the connection not closed properly, which overloads the connection pool.
2. There are too many simultaneous users, which cousing too many connections at the same time.

Since there is only one user on the system, the second option is probably not the answer.

so, how do we clear the connection pool on a shared hosting server ???

lets see what are the options (or to be exact : what are our limits on shared hosting on that issue ?)

• We can't access the IIS configurations.
• We can't get a remote desktop connection (is it too much to ask ?)
• We don't have an access to the connection pool configurations
• We cant restart the server.

Here is the solution :

1. Access to the system to get the error.
2. rename the DB from db.mdb to db1.mdb
3. run the system again (this is an important step),
   the system will think that it's missing it's database and recycle the connection pool(mission accomplished)
4. rename the database file to the original name (db.mdb)
5. run the system again.

now, i have to say , that this is a problem solver for the short run,
whatever caused the problem will probably cause it again at some point.
so, the best solution , is to do some harsh code review and find the problem (where the connection is opened but not closed...)

take care.