When to close MongoDB database connection in Nodejs

Working with Nodejs and MongoDB through Node MongoDB native driver. Need to retrieve some documents, and make modification, then save them right back. This is an example:

db.open(function (err, db) {
  db.collection('foo', function (err, collection) {
    var cursor = collection.find({});
    cursor.each(function (err, doc) {
      if (doc != null) {
        doc.newkey = 'foo'; // Make some changes
        db.save(doc); // Update the document
      } else {
        db.close(); // Closing the connection
      }
    });
  });
});

With asynchronous nature, if the process of updating the document takes longer, then when cursor reaches the end of documents, database connection is closed. Not all updates are saved to the database.

If the db.close() is omitted, all the documents are correctly updated, but the application hangs, never exits.

I saw a post suggesting using a counter to track number of updates, when fall back to zero, then close the db. But am I doing anything wrong here? What is the best way to handle this kind of situation? Does db.close() have to be used to free up resource? Or does a new db connection needs to open?

Answer

Here’s a potential solution based on the counting approach (I haven’t tested it and there’s no error trapping, but it should convey the idea).

The basic strategy is: Acquire the count of how many records need to be updated, save each record asynchronously and a callback on success, which will decrement the count and close the DB if the count reaches 0 (when the last update finishes). By using {safe:true} we can ensure that each update is successful.

The mongo server will use one thread per connection, so it’s good to either a) close unused connections, or b) pool/reuse them.

db.open(function (err, db) {
  db.collection('foo', function (err, collection) {
    var cursor = collection.find({});
    cursor.count(function(err,count)){
      var savesPending = count;

      if(count == 0){
        db.close();
        return;
      }

      var saveFinished = function(){
        savesPending--;
        if(savesPending == 0){
          db.close();
        }
      }

      cursor.each(function (err, doc) {
        if (doc != null) {
          doc.newkey = 'foo'; // Make some changes
          db.save(doc, {safe:true}, saveFinished);
        }
      });
    })
  });
});