What is wrong with runing app in tomcat server? - java

Recently I created a maven based web project and used tomcat as application server to debug ...
But tomcat is frequently dead (pergem error which means out of memery ) after run app from the Project context menu directly.
The worst is that It created many idle threads and they are all can not be killed by manually.
And tomcat status is also can not be detected by NetBeans, it can not be stop and restart.
I must restart my system to clean them.
My system is Fedora 12 x86...
Java version is SUN JDK 6 update 17.
NetBeans verison is 6.7.1.
I tried to create a bug about this, but the NetBeans developer rejected it ... I am very surprise this is a big stopper to use NetBeans to develop web app.
Today I used JBoss 5.1 in the latest NetBeans 6.8rc1 and also encountered the same problem...
I've tried adjusted the VM parameters and allocate more memory but no effects.
I've deployed several seam samples to JBoss 5.1 via seam ant build script , and there is no problem.
But I switch to use NetBeans to do this, It failed due to Out of memory.
What is wrong????

(I'm assuming that the idle threads you are talking about are application threads. If you are talking about Tomcat's worker threads, then they should not cause permgen problems when idle.)
I tried to create a bug about this, but the NetBeans developer rejected it ... I am very surprise ...
I'm very unsurprised. This is not really a NetBeans problem. It is not even really a Tomcat or JBoss problem.
The problem with idle / orphaned application threads is that you cannot safely kill threads in a running JVM. And without the ability to do this you cannot stop leakages of (in this case) permgen space. This is essentially a Java platform problem. It can only be solved when JVMs support the Isolate mechanisms defined by JSR 121.
But assuming that your problem is related to doing hot deployment, it is not just the idle application threads that you have to worry about. If there is any reachable instance of any class that you are redeploying, that will cause the original old class loader and all classes it loaded to remain reachable.
... this is a big stopper to use NetBeans to develop web app.
The solution is to restart your web container every now and then. This will clean out the idle threads and other cruft and release the leaked permgen space. You can ameliorate it by running with a larger heap and more permgen, but you cannot make it go away, especially if some of the orphaned threads are not idle ...
Oh yea, and don't be a big baby! This ain't a show stopper, its just a small inconvenience :-)

Related

Is it necessary to restart tomcat when redeploy a war?

I know Tomcat can reload the .war file when redeploy it, I don't need to kill the Tomcat process and restart it. I can remove the .war, wait for Tomcat to undeploy it, and copy the new .war to the web path. But, after many times of trivial update war without restart the Tomcat, is it possible that Tomcat will not release the memory effectively or cause some performance issues? Assume there is only one war application in one Tomcat instance.
The basic problem is that Java does currently not provide any kind of isolation between the parts of code running in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), in the same way that an operating system does with processes. You can kill a process without affecting another process under Windows/Linux/etc. All you can do is ensuring that things can be garbage collected.
For Tomcat the way that WAR's are being handled - according to the various specifications - require that each war has its own classloader that is responsible for running that code. When the WAR is undeployed the final result should be that that class loader should be garbage collected.
Unfortunately the garbage collector can only handle objects that are completely unreferenced, and there is a large set of subtle bugs that can be present in WAR code that can prohibit this, and then every redeploy cause another classloader to be created and none destroyed so you have a memory leak. A lot of effort has gone into detecting and working around these type of bugs inside Tomcat itself, but it is close to impossible to do 100% right without JVM support.
The only cure besides fixing the WAR is to restart the JVM.
You can watch the memory usage with VisualVM even in production to see what happens over time with the Tomcat JVM.
Yes. It is far cleaner to stop Tomcat, deploy your new war, then restart Tomcat. One drawback is much of your application classes by default won't be loaded till a new request comes in to hit your application but its not a huge issue. Just means theres a few seconds of startup on the very first request to your new WAR. This is how we deploy wars in production.
Also allows us to setup health-checking in the logs if the new war prevents Tomcat from starting up correctly then we rollback the war knowing theres an issue, but thats a separate topic.
What About Down Time?
This might be out of scope of your question but when you want to prevent users from seeing any downtime you would run multiple instance of tomcat and deploy and restart one at a time.

memory leak in tomcat8

Good morning, does anyone know how to solve this in jsf applications after a reload, stop, or undeploy?
The following web applications were stopped (reloaded, undeployed), but their
classes from previous runs are still loaded in memory, thus causing a memory
leak (use a profiler to confirm):
/aplicacaojsf
During development it's perfectly valid to do hot-deploy many times - it will result in an PermGen space error eventually (at least before using JDK 1.8) and you'll have to restart. The message is just a warning to the fact which happens to all containers when re-deploying, that parts of the previous classes are still in memory and will stay there until the end of days.
In production environment, it is good to restart the container - but even there it's not feasible all the times, since that may mean downtime for other applications as well. That's why commercial application servers like Oracle WebLogic do have a sophisticated admin console for jobs like that.

Tomcat on production server, PermGen and redeploys

It looks like
MemoryError: PermGen space
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space
is a common problem. You can Increase the size of your perm space, but after 100 or 200 redeploys it will be full. Tracking ClassLoader memory leaks is nearly impossible.
What are your methods for Tomcat (or another simple servlet container - Jetty?) on production server? Is server restart after each deploy a solution?
Do you use one Tomcat for many applications ?
Maybe I should use many Jetty servers on different ports (or an embedded Jetty) and do undeploy/restart/deploy each time ?
I gave up on using the tomcat manager and now always shutdown tomcat to redeploy.
We run two tomcats on the same server and use apache webserver with mod_proxy_ajp so users can access both apps via the same port 80. This is nice also because the users see the apache Service Unavailable page when the tomcat is down.
You can try adding these Java options:
-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled
This enables garbage collection in PermGen space (off by default) and allows the GC to unload classes. In addition you should use the -XX:PermSize=64m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m mentioned elsewhere to increase the amount of PermGen available.
Yes indeed, this is a problem. We're running three web apps on a Tomcat server: No. 1 uses a web application framework, Hibernate and many other JARs, no. 2 uses Hibernate and a few JARs and no. 3 is basically a very simple JSP application.
When we deploy no. 1, we always restart Tomcat. Otherwise a PermGen space error will soon bite us. No. 2 can sometimes be deployed without problem, but since it often changes when no. 1 does as well, a restart is scheduled anyway. No. 3 poses no problem at all and can be deployed as often as needed without problem.
So, yes, we usually restart Tomcat. But we're also looking forward to Tomcat 7, which is supposed to handle many memory / class loader problems that are burried into different third-party JARs and frameworks.
PermGen switches in HotSpot only delay the problem, and eventually you will get the OutOfMemoryError anyway.
We have had this problem a long time, and the only solution I've found so far is to use JRockit instead. It doesn't have a PermGen, so the problem just disappears. We are evaluating it on our test servers now, and we haven't had one PermGen issue since the switch. I also tried redeploying more than 20 times on my local machine with an app that gets this error on first redeploy, and everything chugged along beautifully.
JRockit is meant to be integrated into OpenJDK, so maybe this problem will go away for stock Java too in the future.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/jrockit/overview/index.html
And it's free, under the same license as HotSpot:
https://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/jrockit_is_now_free_and
You should enable PermGen garbage collection. By default Hotspot VM does NOT collect PermGen garbage, which means all loaded class files remain in memory forever. Every new deployment loads a new set of class files which means you eventually run out of PermGen space.
Which version of Tomcat are you using? Tomcat 7 and 6.0.30 have many features to avoid these leaks, or at least warn you about their cause.
This presentation by Mark Thomas of SpringSource (and longtime Tomcat committer) on this subject is very interesting.
Just of reference, there is a new version of Plumbr tool, that can monitor and detect Permanent Generation leaks as well.

Is it possible to monitor jboss if it happens to run out of memory?

Sometimes when I redeploy war too many times, jboss gives java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space error, is it possible to monitor jboss with other Java program that is not run inside jboss, to make sure it has not run ot of memory and if it is, then automatically restart jboss?
I would expect that you can monitor the memory consumption via JMX and the MemoryMXBean. You can do this interactively via JConsole, or code up a simple monitor to do this automatically.
Here's some details on how to do this in-process, but you can do this remotely as well. See the JMX docs for more info.
Alternatively, you can run a process under the JavaServiceWrapper, and get it to shutdown/restart a process depending on messages coming out from stdout/err. That may be a simple way to perform your restart automatically. However, I'd prefer using the JMX solution in the long term so you can get advance warning of issues (and perhaps tie them to their underlying cause).
I would suggest HypericHQ. It's a very good standalone application that can monitor your JBoss instances, alert you when the permgen or heap gets low, and can even trigger a restart if required. It's a complex beast, but worth the investment.

Websphere Application Server - What on earth will it take to start any fast?

I am using Rational Application Developer v7.0 that ships with an integrated test environment. When I get to debugging my webapp, the server startup time in debug mode is close to 5-6 minutes - enough time to take a coffee break!
At times, it so pisses me off that I start cursing IBM for building an operating system instead of an app server! Spawning 20+ processes and useless services with no documented configuration to tuning it, to starting any faster.
I am sure there are many java developers out there who would agree with me on this. I tried to disable the default apps and a set of services via my admin console, however that hasn't helped much.
I have no webservices, no enterprise beans, no queues, just a simple web app which requires a connection pool. Have you done something in the past to make your integrated test environment, start fast in debug mode and there by consume less RAM?
UPDATE:
I tried disabling a few services (internationalization, default apps etc...) and now the WebSphere server went from bad to worse. Not only doesn't it take horrifying startup time, it keeps freezing every now and then for up to 2 minutes. :-( Sounds like, optimization is not such a good thing, always!
The best way to debug server code is to use remote debugging.
First you need to add the following to the JVM params in the server start script:
-Xdebug -Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005
This will cause the JVM to listen on the specified port, then from your IDE you can start a remote debug session against that port and debug as if the code was running in the same process.
Working this way prevent you restarting the server so frequently and hence side-steps your problem with Websphere's start-up time.
You can get some odd results if the binaries on the server and the source in the IDE get out of sync but on the whole that's not a problem.
One of the main reasons is that you have a large application with many modules, classes, manifests, XML descriptors so on, and the fact that Websphere application server start up process is single threaded per se (thus each application may be started in a separate thread if they has equal weight). One other reason is that the Eclipse EMF and JST frameworks are very I/O intensive during startup and publish/deploy.
One other reason for the tedious start up is the annotation scanning which will occur during publish/deploy. This annotation scanning can be controlled and modified in a various ways. Look at this site:
http://wasdynacache.blogspot.se/2012/05/how-to-speed-up-annotation-processing.html
First of all, examine and evaluate your hardware, both CPU, memory and HDD. Is your processor/s running 100% for a long time during start up? If so, the processor may be too weak. Is paging occur? then you may have to put in some more RAM. The Websphere/eclipse JST and EMF frameworks are very I/O intense so you should consider to invest in a SSD disc. You should also make sure that other processes on your machine (virus protection software etc.) don´t steal hardware resources from the Websphere java processes.
So for the hardware:
1. Processor - a pretty fast one, since the publish and the startup is mostly singlethreaded you do not need that many cpu cores
2. Memory - You will at least need 512Mb of physical RAM, this depends of the size of your application of course.
3. Storage - I would definitely go for a fast SSD since the underlying eclipse framework is I/O intensive.
Here are some tricks to reduce the footprint of the start up phase. Please before applying these settings make sure that you record a baseline start up so that you can observe the difference in start up, i.e. the reduced start up time.
JVM args : -Xverify:none -Xquickstart -Xnoclassgc -XX:+UseNUMA -XtlhPrefetch -Xgcthreads4 (I got 4 virtual processors installed on my machine)
Extend the heap size to match the demands of your application.
Disable the autostart of the application to reduce publish time.
Disable PMI and unnecessary tracing.
Profile your application during startup and fix bottlenecks if found any.
Other JVM arguments that may gain performance:
com.ibm.cacheLocalHost=true
com.ibm.ws.classloader.zipFileCacheSize=512
com.ibm.ws.classloader.resourceRequestCacheSize=1024  
com.ibm.ws.management.event.pull_notification_timeout =20000
com.ibm.ws.amm.scan.context.filter.packages=true
org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.commonarchivecore.disableZip=true
Jvm arguments that will make the Websphere application server to stop immediately:
com.ibm.ejs.sm.server.quiesceTimeout=0
com.ibm.ejs.sm.server.quiesceInactiveRequestTime=1000
Webcontainer properties:
com.ibm.wsspi.jsp.disableTldSearch=true
com.ibm.wsspi.jsp.disableResourceInjection=true
JVM arguments that may be specified eclipse.ini (Note that the heap parameters is configured according to the conditions of my environment)
-Dcom.ibm.ws.management.event.max_polling_interval=5000
-Xquickstart
-Xverify:none
-Xmxcl25000
-Xjit:dataTotal=65536
-Xcodecache64m
-Xscmx48m
-Xnolinenumbers
-Xverify:none
-Xmnx64m
-Xmx1446m
-Xmnx64m
-XX:+UseCompressedOops
-XX:+UseNUMA
5 to 6 mins is not normal. I use RAD and WAS everyday and get decent startup times. Which version of WAS are you running and how much RAM do you have?
If you share several workspaces and projects for a same WAS profile, consider creating a new WAS profile for your workspace.
You probably tried that but here's a simple check list of things to try on first hand. Make sure that your server settings in RAD has the following options enabled:
Optimize server for testing and developing
Run server with resources on the workspace
Minimize application files copied to the server
Uncheck "Enable universal test client" if you don't need it.
In the admin console you can verify some server settings such as
Run in development mode
Parallel start
Start components as needed
You can also uninstall the ivt app that comes installed by default when creating a new WAS profile. Then the usual things such as a drive that is not too fragmented and a pagefile size that is properly set.
And one last thing that you probably know already, republish to your server instead of restarting it.
That's one reason why Spring was born.
You don't even have to give all the niceties like JMS, remoting, etc. You'd be better off with Tomcat, ActiveMQ, and OpenEJB.
Anything but WebSphere.
There's some hints and tips for tuning RAD 6 on developerworks that may help, many of these also apply for RAD 7.
I have seen a similar list for RAD 7, I'll post it if I can find it.
I did find some tuning tips for Portal on RAD 7.
I would say my experience with the test environment has been suboptimal. I now tend to use Tomcat/Pluto configured for remote debugging with an External launch configuration to manage it from within bare Eclipse and rely on having appropriate JNDI configurations to abstract the underlying server.
If you are coding to the relevant APIs it shouldn't matter for development purposes that you're not on Websphere. If you do have a Webpshere specific issue you can always crank up the beast to debug it.
If you have no EJBs, no JMS, etc., just deploy under a standalone servlet container such as Tomcat or Jetty, you'll be amazed how fast it is :-), being ironic here but it's true!
If the connection pool really is the only appserver feature you use then why don't you simply use apache commons dbcp (http://commons.apache.org/dbcp/) drop webfear alltogether and use jetty instead. That should reduce your startup time to about 5 seconds. You can then later easily switch to websphere again for your production environment if you should really feel the need to.
WAS V7 addresses some of these problems by allowing you to configure what starts up when the app server starts up.
So if and when you migrate to WAS V7 you might seem some improvements in this space.

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