Connection management¶

Django opens a connection to the database when it first makes a database query. It keeps this connection open and reuses it in subsequent requests. Django closes the connection once it exceeds the maximum age defined by CONN_MAX_AGE or when it isn’t usable any longer.

In detail, Django automatically opens a connection to the database whenever it needs one and doesn’t have one already — either because this is the first connection, or because the previous connection was closed.

At the beginning of each request, Django closes the connection if it has reached its maximum age. If your database terminates idle connections after some time, you should set CONN_MAX_AGE to a lower value, so that Django doesn’t attempt to use a connection that has been terminated by the database server. (This problem may only affect very low traffic sites.)

At the end of each request, Django closes the connection if it has reached its maximum age or if it is in an unrecoverable error state. If any database errors have occurred while processing the requests, Django checks whether the connection still works, and closes it if it doesn’t. Thus, database errors affect at most one request; if the connection becomes unusable, the next request gets a fresh connection.