Connection Strings - Impact on Performance & Security

You can use the following values of connection string intelligently to get maximum performance according to your environment;
1. Asynchronous Processing: When true, enables asynchronous operation support. Recognized values are true, false, yes, and no.

2. Connection Lifetime or Load Balance Timeout: 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.

3. Connection Timeout: The length of time (in seconds) to wait for a connection to the server before terminating the attempt and generating an error. Valid values are greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to 2147483647.

4. Max Pool Size: This property is an integer with a default of 100 and specifies the maximum number of connections to maintain in the pool.

5. Min Pool Size: This property is an integer with a default of zero. It specifies a minimum number of connections to maintain in the pool. If you set this to 5, for example, the first time you connect to the server, ADO.NET will create five connections and prepare them for pooling.

6. The pool limiter

The Max Pool Size property acts as a limiter to the connection pool. If you leave this property set to 100 (the default), up to 100 connections from your application will be placed in the pool. When the 101st connection request comes along, it is queued to wait for an available connection. If no connection becomes available during the timeout period for the connection string (this period can be customized with the Connect Timeout connection string property and defaults to 60 seconds), an error is returned instead of an open connection.