The information shown depends in the location the exception is happening. Initially we only saw this:
Connection timed out: connect
Or this:
com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.CommunicationsException: Communications link failure
It might even be as insightful as this:
com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.CommunicationsException: The driver was unable to create a connection due to an inability to establish the client portion of a socket.
This is usually caused by a limit on the number of sockets imposed by the operating system. This limit is usually configurable.
For Unix-based platforms, see the manual page for the 'ulimit' command. Kernel or system reconfiguration may also be required.
For Windows-based platforms, see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 196271 (Q196271).
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:513)
at com.mysql.jdbc.Util.handleNewInstance(Util.java:406)
at com.mysql.jdbc.SQLError.createCommunicationsException(SQLError.java:1074)
at com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.createNewIO(ConnectionImpl.java:2103)
at com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.(ConnectionImpl.java:718)
at com.mysql.jdbc.JDBC4Connection.(JDBC4Connection.java:46)
at sun.reflect.GeneratedConstructorAccessor65.newInstance(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:513)
at com.mysql.jdbc.Util.handleNewInstance(Util.java:406)
at com.mysql.jdbc.ConnectionImpl.getInstance(ConnectionImpl.java:302)
at com.mysql.jdbc.NonRegisteringDriver.connect(NonRegisteringDriver.java:282)
at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:582)
at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:154)
at org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource.getConnectionFromDriverManager(DriverManagerDataSource.java:173)
at org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource.getConnectionFromDriver(DriverManagerDataSource.java:164)
Here the cause is clearly stated. Somehow the MySQL driver is opening many new connections until it reached the limits of the Operating System. A solution could be to try to find a better driver, but instead we opted to introduce connection pooling using Apache commons-dbcp as suggested in the comments for DriverManagerDataSource and this SpringSource forum post. Simply add it to your pom.xml (if you are using maven):
<dependency>
<groupId>commons-dbcp</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-dbcp</artifactId>
<version>1.3</version>
</dependency>
And change your datasource:
<bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource">
<property name="driverClassName" value="${jdbc.driverClassName}"/>
<property name="url" value="${jdbc.url}"/>
<property name="username" value="${jdbc.username}"/>
<property name="password" value="${jdbc.password}"/>
</bean>
Done. Now when running our tooling only 18 connections are made instead of 3000+ before.