How to shrink DB Connection Pool?

Question

I am using Apache DBCP with JNDI in my tomcat container to pool connections to a mysql database. Everything works fine but a problem i am seeing is that once a pconnection is pooled it is never released. So after a load spike connection sit their forever sleeping. Is their a way to shrink the pool through context.xml parameters? here is my ocnfiguration:

        defaultAutoCommit="false"
        defaultTransactionIsolation="REPEATABLE_READ"
        auth="Container"
        type="javax.sql.DataSource"
        logAbandoned="true" 
        removeAbandoned="true"
        removeAbandonedTimeout="300" 
        maxActive="-1"
        initialSize="15"
        maxIdle="10"
        maxWait="10000" 
        username="user"
        password="password"
        driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
        url="jdbc:mysql://localhost/mydb"/>

Answer 1

Try to set minEvictableIdleTimeMillis to lower value than its default, which is 1000*60*30.