c3p0 pool cannot establish a connection. How to debug this?

Question

I have a Tomcat and PostgreSQL installed on a server. I'm having a connection problem trying to connect from my servlet to PostgreSQL database using c3p0 pool.

I can reach DB if I'm running Tomcat locally on my laptop. Also I can connect from server to DB using psql (i.e. command line sql utility). But when I'm trying to deploy my servlet to server and establish a connection I'm getting the following error:

java.sql.SQLException: Connections could not be acquired from the underlying database!
    com.mchange.v2.sql.SqlUtils.toSQLException(SqlUtils.java:106)
...
    com.mchange.v2.resourcepool.CannotAcquireResourceException: A ResourcePool could not acquire a resource from its primary factory or source.
        com.mchange.v2.resourcepool.BasicResourcePool.awaitAvailable(BasicResourcePool.java:1319)
        com.mchange.v2.resourcepool.BasicResourcePool.prelimCheckoutResource(BasicResourcePool.java:557)
        com.mchange.v2.resourcepool.BasicResourcePool.checkoutResource(BasicResourcePool.java:477)

What should I check to locate a problem? It should be a trivial issue but may be due to 4 a.m. I'm missing something :) Thanks in advance!

PS: Connection from all network interfaces are allowed to database. PostgreSQL JDBC driver and c3p0 pool are distributed in WAR. Tomcat configuration is very default. JNDI is not used.

Answer 1

You need to check a few things:

1. java.policy which tomcat is using (e.g. /etc/tomcat5.5/policy.d/02debian.policy)
2. db server settings (e.g. /etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf)
3. try connecting without pool first as in my case c3p0 was hiding important information from me

Answer 2

Adding to @Alexey's answer, I had this issue with Tomcat and PostgreSQL 9.4. In my case, the md5 authentication method in postgres was causing the issue.

If you are using Windows server or RHEL server, make sure you update the authentication method in pg_hba.conf file. Modify it to trust and restart postgresql.