connection pointer is NULL

[yawnt]

I have a web app that uses node-postgres and after a while i notice this error in the logs

Error: connection pointer is NULL
at  at Connection.connection.on.q (....:146:17)
at Connection.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:88:17)

and database calls are (obviously) impossible after that , therefore i need to restart the app.. is there a way to avoid this?

Thanks

[freewil]

Is there anymore information you can provide? OS? Postgres version? Some example code of how you are connecting to the database?

I have several apps that connect to Postgres manually (by creating a pg.Client object without connection pooling) for long periods of time and I have never had any problems with losing connection as this error seems to indicate.

[yawnt]

my app is running on nodejitsu, so it's on SmartOS with heroku's postgresql (v 9.1.3)

code:

this.client = new pg.Client(connStr); // connStr is a string like postgres://user:pwd@host/db
this.client.connect();

Thanks a lot :)

[freewil]

Each time you create a pg.Client object you are creating a new connection to Postgres. If you do this for each request then you will eventually exhaust all your allowable connections to Postgres.

You can instead use pg.connect() which will take advantage of connection pooling and reuse connections, by default it will only create a maximum of 10 connections.

[yawnt]

ooh i didn't know that.. thanks a lot :)

i'll try and if that works i'll close the issue

[freewil]

@yawnt please close this as this is not an actual bug/problem

EDIT: sorry, didnt notice the last part there 😄

[yawnt]

yeah the fact is that i don't create a connection for every request, but just once.. looking into pooling anyway @freewil

[yawnt]

uhm it looks like i create the client only once :( , so that's not the problem

[freewil]

Are you trying to connect over SSL? pg doesn't actually support this yet without using the native bindings which you can use with require('pg').native

See #170

[brianc]

I've seen this issue before a long time ago though I cannot remember what it was. Could you post a larger code sample? Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, I'm 99% sure it's due to your use of the library.

Just to be sure, it does execute some queries before this issue happens, correct?

[yawnt]

yes, it does execute queries.. this is the whole code

https://github.com/yawnt/hater/blob/master/lib/builders/postgresql.js

[yawnt]

have you had time to look at the code perhaps @brianc ? thanks

[brianc]

I haven't had a chance to look at the code in detail within the module you're using. I would guess there is some custom connection pooling within the hater module that's not correctly checking in / checking out clients? At least that's where I would check first. Is there any particular place where the queries stop working or does it just randomly stop within some block of executing the same query n times?

[yawnt]

what i do is: i create a single client and then use that for every query i make (via a Query instance).
the connection seems to drop after it has been inactive for a while, not after a certain amount of queries

thank you :)