Commons Pool/DBCP minIdle Implementation

[Richard Wareing <wa...@rewc.com>]

Hello everyone,

For a project I'm working on we needed the capability to have the number
of idle objects in the pool (database connections via DBCP in this case)
to stay at some minimum level for performance reasons.

The main performance benefit I saw for this was X number of connections
always being available in the event the pools connections became stale
for some reason (e.g. database went down and came back up some time
later).  For high latency database connections (>250ms) this equates to
a substantial savings in query time as well as adds to the QOS (rather
than having the first person in after the pool being cleaned out trigger
a new connection).

Anyhow, I implemented the feature in commons-pool as well as
commons-dbcp and I was wondering if you might consider it for
integration into the main trees?  If so how does one go about
contributing this to the project?  The changes were relatively trivial
and IMHO :) really improve the performance and resilience of the
package.

Richard Wareing
Software Engineer
Reimer Technology Group