AWS Certified Developer Associate DVA-C02 Practice Question

Intermittent connection timeouts can occur when the application exhausts the database's allowable concurrent connections. RDS enforces an engine-specific max_connections limit; when that threshold is reached, new connection attempts wait until a slot frees or until the client times out. Reviewing the current connection count and ensuring the application's connection pool is configured to reuse-rather than constantly open-connections is the logical next step.

Enabling AWS X-Ray can reveal latency between services but will not expose connection saturation. High CPU on the DB instance could degrade query performance, yet it does not typically prevent establishing a connection. Simply raising client socket timeouts masks symptoms instead of identifying the underlying cause and does not address connection exhaustion.