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

We faced the same issue and fixed it. Below is the reason and solution.

Problem

When the connection pool mechanism is used, the application server (in our case, it is JBOSS) creates connections according to the min-connection parameter. If you have 10 applications running, and each has a min-connection of 10, then a total of 100 sessions will be created in the database. Also, in every database, there is a max-session parameter, if your total number of connections crosses that border, then you will get Got minus one from a read call.

FYI: Use the query below to see your total number of sessions:

SELECT username, count(username) FROM v$session 
WHERE username IS NOT NULL group by username

Solution: With the help of our DBA, we increased that max-session parameter, so that all our application min-connection can accommodate.