Ping does not drop/redeploy the pool. All it does is to get an unpooled connection, wherein a managed connection is created. If the managed connection could not be created, an exception is thrown as ping failure. Its possible that setting of a different attribute in your connection pool is causing the connections in the pool to be reset. Please post your connection pool configuration from the domain.xml
[Message sent by forum member 'sm157516']
http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=398335