We've seen some odd behavior with ArcGIS Server at a client's site and at our shop. We've set up a Server to mainly host one service. We don't tend to hit it very hard. After running it for a while (weeks), we notice that it is maintaining 100+ connections to the database. Also, after restarting the server and letting that service start up, but before we run any queries on the service, it has opened 4 connections to the database.
At our client's site, the behavior is more pronounced (and perhaps unrelated). The same service crashes their Server after running there for a while (with out of memory errors in the log). They have been able to stabilize things by setting the min and max SOC process counts to the same number (2). The server hasn't crashed on them for a couple weeks since they made this change. We're thinking that they may be related because if lots of connections are being held open it could cause the server to run out of memory.
Is this expected behavior? Is there some tuning steps we can take to lessen this? Perhaps we need to change how we query it?