Is this a time-out issue?

Hello all.

I'm running 7.2 on a SuSE 8.0 machine. Overall this is running very
well. Except for the following. We have an application running on an
RS/6000. It opens a socket to the machine running SuSE. On this SuSE
machine is a Java application that reads in data from the socket, parses
it, and writes it via JDBC to the database, which is running on the same
machine.

There are about 100,000 rows a day added to the db. When this is
running all seems O.K. However, every once in a while, the data stops
being written to the db.

What happens is that the client still sends data, but it does not get
written to the db. If I restart the Java app, all is well again. This
seems to happen after extended periods of being idle. Currently the app is
in testing, so goes for days without receiving data. I have been unable to
determine where the breakage is. I think the issue is that the connection
to the db times out, or the socket to the client times out.

Any ideas?