Hi Daniel.  I was under the impression that a new Document object is generated 
and only accessible within each invocation of handleMessage() and thus would 
not be susceptible to thread-safety issues, but I'll take your advice over my 
very limited understanding of the inner workings of CXF ;).

I like your idea of writing it to a CachedOutputStream inside the lock.  I will 
give that a try and look into submitting a patch.

Thanks again!

--John


On Jun 7, 2013, at 12:21 PM, Daniel Kulp <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> On Jun 7, 2013, at 12:30 PM, John Bellassai <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> We've been seeing an issue in production for the past few months where after 
>> running smoothly for a couple weeks, our application hangs and stops 
>> responding to new requests until we bounce the container (Tomcat 7/CXF 
>> 2.5.3).
>> 
>> Some thread/heap dump analysis for a few of these hang events have shown a 
>> running theme.  It seems that all of Tomcat's HTTPS handler threads except 
>> one are waiting on a specific lock to become available.  The problem is in 
>> the org.apache.cxf.frontend.WSDLGetInterceptor class, specifically in the 
>> synchronized block in the handleMessage method.
>> 
>> What we are experiencing seems to not technically be a deadlock because one 
>> thread is legitimately holding the lock and is still runnable and writing 
>> the WSDL to the client, but for some reason (network issues perhaps), it is 
>> not making very quick progress while other threads continue to pile up.  
>> Eventually all of Tomcat's handler threads are in use and are waiting for 
>> this lock so from the outside, the server does not respond to new requests.
>> 
>> In examining the code for this interceptor I wonder if the synchronized 
>> block needs to be as coarse as it is currently.  In other words, would it be 
>> possible to lock only while creating the WSDL Document object, then actually 
>> write to the XMLStreamWriter outside of the synchronized block such that all 
>> threads can make progress even if one client happens to be slow or 
>> experiencing network issues?
> 
> I don't think that would be possible for two reasons:
> 
> 1) Another thread could then modify the document while it's being written 
> out.   I'm not exactly sure what would happen in that case.
> 
> 2) Traversing a DOM object is also not thread safe:  
> http://xerces.apache.org/xerces2-j/faq-dom.html#faq-1
> Thus, you don't want 2 threads traversing it at the same time.
> 
> One potential fix that might work would be to write it to a 
> CachedOutputStream within the lock.  That should be fairly fast.  Then 
> outside the lock, write that to the network stream.    Would you care to give 
> that a try and maybe submit a patch?
> 
> 
> -- 
> Daniel Kulp
> [email protected] - http://dankulp.com/blog
> Talend Community Coder - http://coders.talend.com
> 

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