How to approach a “Got minus one from a read call” error when connecting to an Amazon RDS Oracle instance

Question

I\'m running Oracle 11GR2 on an Amazon RDS instance. occasionally I get an IO Error: Got minus one from a read call when making a call to DriverManager.ge

Answer 1

The immediate cause of the problem is that the JDBC driver has attempted to read from a network Socket that has been closed by "the other end".

This could be due to a few things:

• If the remote server has been configured (e.g. in the "SQLNET.ora" file) to not accept connections from your IP.

• If the JDBC url is incorrect, you could be attempting to connect to something that isn't a database.

• If there are too many open connections to the database service, it could refuse new connections.

Given the symptoms, I think the "too many connections" scenario is the most likely. That suggests that your application is leaking connections; i.e. creating connections and then failing to (always) close them.