Java+Tomcat, Dying database connection?

Tomcat Documentation

DBCP uses the Jakarta-Commons Database Connection Pool. It relies on number of Jakarta-Commons components:

* Jakarta-Commons DBCP
* Jakarta-Commons Collections
* Jakarta-Commons Pool

This attribute may help you out.

removeAbandonedTimeout="60"

I'm using the same connection pooling stuff and I'm setting these properties to prevent the same thing it's just not configured through tomcat. But if the first thing doesn't work try these.

testWhileIdle=true
timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis=300000

Just to clarify what is actually causing this. MySQL by default terminates open connections after 8 hours of inactivity. However the database connection pool will retain connections for longer than that.

So by setting timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis=300000 you are instructing the connection pool to run through connections and evict and close idle ones every 5 minutes.