An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine

Question

The application uses quickfixj library, which uses Apache Mina. This application keeps a socket connection to a remote host.

Suddenly we get the following error:

[SocketConnectorIoProcessor-0.0]   - ERROR quickfix.mina.initiator.InitiatorIoHandler  - socket exception (/xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xx): An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine

where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xx is the remote address.

What may be causing the connection drop? The remote host? My OS?

Answer 1

Most firewalls kill an idle connection after some time.

Answer 2

The connection was being dropped by some switch because the machine bandwidth was too high (above the limit)