Patent ID: 7702796

Claim:
A method comprising: in response to a request, selecting a current connection from a pool, wherein the pool comprises a plurality of connections to a server, wherein a plurality of applications share the pool of the plurality of connections; deciding whether the current connection is; if the current connection is stale, determining whether a number of stale connections encountered during a time period is greater than an adaptive threshold; if the determining is true, performing recovery on all of the plurality of connections in the pool, wherein the performing the recovery on all of the plurality of connections in the pool further comprises sending a ping message to the server on each of the plurality of connections and removing the connections from the pool for which the ping message is unsuccessful; if the determining is false, performing recovery on the current connection; and changing the adaptive threshold by an amount specified by a rule if a ration to the number of stale connections to a number of good connections encountered during the time period satisfies a ration comparison statement specified by the rule.