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Tuesday, August 20, 2013

provider: TCP Provider, error:

Error:
A transport-level error has occurred when sending the request to the server. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.)

General Explanation:
This error will show if a connection is drawn from the connection pool and the connection to the server has been lost.
There is no way for a connection in the pool to know that the connection has been severed.

Reason:
There are a few common reasons for this.
1 The server has been restarted, this will close the existing connections.
2 Someone or something has killed the SPID that is being used. Connection drop or Deadlock where a victim is chosen could be one of the reason.

Probale Solutions:
#1 Connection pooling (Not recommended)
Because of reason 1, we tried turning off connection pooling at application level even that did not help.

#2 TCP Chimney Offload
This may also be caused by other, non SQL Server related, reasons. 
I have for example seen issues where the TCP Chimney Offload feature on the server machine is turned ON, causing this. Short info about this feature;
When TCP Chimney Offload is enabled and the NIC implements what is called the TCP Offload Engine, then some of the TCP processing is handed over to the hardware, i.e. the NIC.
By doing this, the CPU is offloaded, and since TCP could require a lot of processing this would mean that the CPU will be allowed to perform other tasks.

We tried by disabling it on server but it did not help.

#3. Deadlock
We checked using profiler for deadlock events, but there were none in trace.
 
#4 Setting Static IP address on NIC
It helped us in solving the issue.



Hope it helps.

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