Why does PyMongo throw AutoReconnect?

Question

While researching some strange issues with my Python web application (in particular, issues regarding MongoDB connectivity), I noticed something on the official PyMongo document

Answer 1

You're misunderstanding AutoReconnect. It is raised when the driver attempts to communicate with the server (to send a command or other operation) and a network failure or similar problem occurs. The name of the exception is meant to communicate that you do not have to create a new instance of MongoClient, the existing client will attempt to reconnect automatically when your application tries the next operation. If the same problem occurs, AutoReconnect is raised again.

I suspect the reason you are seeing sockets timeout (and AutoReconnect being raised) is that there is a load balancer between the server and your application that closes connections after some period of inactivity. For example, this apparently happens on Microsoft's Azure platform after 13 minutes of no activity on a socket. You might be able to fix this by using the socketKeepAlive option, added in PyMongo 2.8. Note that you will also have to set the keepalive interval on your application server to an appropriate value (the default on Linux is 2 hours). See here for more information.