Closed
Description
When a connection is returned to the pool, its creation time is compared with the current time, and the connection is destroyed if that time span (in seconds) exceeds the value specified by
Connection Lifetime. This is useful in clustered configurations to force load balancing between a running server and a server just brought online. A value of zero (0) causes pooled connections to have the maximum connection timeout.
This appears to enforce a maximum lifetime on any individual connection that is created. It's not clear to me (from the documentation) if some kind of watchdog is proactively cleaning up old connections in the pool, or if this only applies strictly to when a connection is returned.