Re: Idle transactions

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 13:39:28 +0200, Tino Schwarze wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 11:15:54AM +0000, Mateus Interciso wrote:
>
>> Hello, it's been a while that I'm seeing that our servers running JBoss
>> with PostgreSQL, after some hours of work, have at least 70 or more
>> "<IDLE> in transaction" status for transactions, and this is bogging
>> down our servers.
>> Is this normal behaviour? If not, is there anything I can do to prevent
>> it? Why is it happening? What's a transaction that is "<IDLE> in
>> transaction" actually really means?
>
> "idle in transaction" means that someone did a "begin", but didn't issue
> a "commit" or "rollback" yet. It is often a sign of bad application
> design and you should contact the application developers. Since open
> transactions may hold locks on tables, the whole application may stop
> unexpectedly if transactions are left open.
>
> Another possibility is that you've just got a huge workload, e.g. lots
> of concurrent access to the application so that it has to perform a lot
> of work, but then you should see SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/etc. as well, not
> only "idle in transaction".
>
> In Java terms, code which uses a transaction should always look like
> this:
> boolean success = false; // default: roll back, e.g. on Exception
> connection.openTransaction();
> try
> {
> // perform work
> success = true;
> }
> finally
> {
> connection.closeTransaction (success);
> }
>
> HTH,
>
> Tino.

Thanks for your reply.
Is there any way on PostgreSQL that I can see the transaction that
haven't been commited?

This would simplify the debugging.

Thanks a lot.

Mateus.