JDBC connection timeout cannot reconnect

I suppose the issue comes up because the database server kills the connection while the application connection pool still has a handle on it. By having a time out on the application connection pool shorter than on the database server side, the connection gets renewed by the application connection pool before it gets killed by the database server, thus avoiding the issue. My MySQL database server has a timeout wait of 28800 seconds and my application connection pool C3P0 has a timeout wait of 14400 seconds. It makes sense that the chain of timeout waits has to go shorter from servers to clients.