All the world process uses a DB connection. I can also tell you that SQL queries are sometimes queued and flushed when the server has time. It's a common practice to keep a pool of connections open, this is because establishing a connection is CPU-consuming. Doing what you suggest is a bad idea as-is. On the other side, identifying the component that doesn't re-use the connection it has open to see whether it doesn't lack a proper pooling mechanism makes more sense. By the way, if you run the world, connections will be made but if nobody is playing on it, the problem does not occur nether because you never reach the time-out. Another idea is to handle properly a DB-side timeout.