Hi Normen,

The Java Thread Model does not support forcefully stopping a thread executing 
arbitrary code. Thread.stop() is deprecated as it unlocks all the monitors it 
has locked and other threads may view an inconsistent state of protected 
objects. Thread.interrupt() does not guarantee when or if the thread will be 
interrupted. There are some tricks what work in certain cases but not in 
general.

To implement reliably such functionality, you may spawn a new process (e.g. 
Process p = processBuilder.start()) and keep a reference to the Process p. The 
new process will execute the transformation using Xalan or any other code. When 
needed, you may kill it (p.destroy()).

But this is not enough. You will need to choose a way for interprocess 
communication (sockets ? files ? or better some library) and implement it. 

It is much easier and better to find what is causing the memory leak. There are 
plenty of tools in Java to help with this task. Xalan and FOP work quite well 
and I am not aware of any memory leak. I suggest to let the application run for 
some time and when the memory usage is getting high, connect to it using Java 
Mission Control or jVisualVM or even JConsole or jmap to take a heap dump. Then 
analyze the heap dump to find out where memory is retained. If the heap dump is 
several GBs, I suggest to use Eclipse MAT which works with huge heap dumps. 


HTH,
Alexios Giotis







> On 13 Dec 2017, at 14:52, Normen Ruhrus <n.ruh...@alphasoft.biz> wrote:
> 
> Hey there,
>  
> using FOP for quite some time now, thanks everyone for all the fine 
> development.
>  
> Iam running FOP 2.0 embedded into a Servlet on Tomcat 8.0.x with Java8 on a 
> Windows Machine (server 2012 R2).
> Usually we have no problems but from time to time during the transformation 
> org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl.transform() process an Out of 
> Memory Error occurs.
>  
> When trying to recreate the problem with the same XML and same XSL we have no 
> problems; the process takes a very short time (<100ms) and uses not much 
> memory (<50MB).
> The application is configured so it can cosume up to 12GB(!) of RAM so it 
> looks like some indefinite looping is going on, but unfortunately i have no 
> further  logs at this time to help me with the investigation.
>  
> This is why i wanted to put the transformation into a seperate Thread and 
> supervise it and kill it off if a certain timeout is reached, however iam not 
> able to. 
> So the question is can you think of any way to stop this processing? I have 
> implemented the multithreading here with FutureTasks but can switch to just 
> Threads easily, too. It would be better to kill off the Thread before it 
> throws an Out of Memory error  and with this affecting the whole Servlet so 
> that subsequent requests cannot be processed anymore.
>  
> Naturally it would be best to find the source of the problem, of course, but 
> that can take me some time and i would like to have a fallback solution 
> instead with forcefully stopping the Transformation.
> Hope someone is able to help me out with this; thanks in advance and best 
> Greetings
>  
> Normen

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