Connection pool pinging

We are getting a variety of errors from our production website,
including 'Connection has already been closed' and 'Connection pool
full' errors.
 
Can adding connection pool pinging, ie:
 
        <init-param ping-table="my_table"/>
        <init-param ping-on-idle="true"/>  

 
 to the web.xml help with these errors?
 
I have tried to undertake some load testing and so far haven't proven
anything except that performance seems to degrade a little when you do
this.