In an embodiment, in response to a request, a connection is selected from a pool of connections to a server. If the connection is stale and the number of stale connections encountered is greater than an adaptive threshold, then recovery is performed on all of the connections in the pool. If the number of stale connections is not greater than the adaptive threshold, then recovery is performed on the stale connection. A decision is made whether the connection is stale by sending the request to the server via the connection and detecting whether the sending encountered an error and by receiving a response from the server via the current connection and detecting whether the response indicates that the request encountered an error at the server.