I had this problem with a SOA system written in Java. I was running both the client and the server on different physical machines and they worked fine for a long time, then those nasty connection resets appeared in the client log and there wasn't anything strange in the server log. Restarting both client and server didn't solve the problem. Finally we discovered that the heap on the server side was rather full so we increased the memory available to the JVM: problem solved! Note that there was no OutOfMemoryError in the log: memory was just scarce, not exhausted.