tomcat crash puzzle

[Dan McGowan]

All,
I am having recurring problems with tomcat crashing. It crashes routinely several times per week during peek access and off hours. Particulars:

version: 4.1.12
os: Mac OS X 10.2.3
hardware: X-Serve 512 mb ram
java: 1.3.1
db: MySQL 3.23.53
java framework: struts 1.0

Note: not using connector with apache. Tomcat using port 80

I have examined tomcat and application logs and I am not seeing any correlation to the actual crash. It would be great to post associated tracebacks but I am having difficulty establishing a pattern. The application exceptions are normal and the servlet log exceptions are commonly a broken pipe:

(Example: 2003-02-12 14:08:14 StandardWrapperValve[default]: Servlet.service() for servlet default threw exception
java.io.IOException: Broken pipe�). Again the time correlation for these exceptions do not match the time the server crashes. The logs I have examined are

Application log: log4j.log �logging exceptions
Tomcat system log: Catalina.out
Various loggers for the deployed contexts
Connection pool log
Cryptic apple crash log�here is an excerpt:

��Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000008��

Within this log Thread 2 seems to be the thread that crashes most often.

My first thought was a resource problem, so I closely examined my database connection pooling. Logs confirm that connections are opened and closed properly and the growth of the pool is managed and never grows beyond the specified number of connections. When the server crashes the pool is behaving normally.

In addition I have set the memory min and max parameters for tomcat in the startup script (JAVA_OPTS = -server -Xmx256m -Xms128m). Any suggestions on causation and/or data collection would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,

Dan McGowan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]