On Aug 22, 2011, at 12:53 PM, Chuck Hill wrote:

> On 2011-08-22, at 12:48 PM, Tim Worman wrote:
>> On Aug 22, 2011, at 11:51 AM, Tim Worman wrote:
>> On Aug 22, 2011, at 11:38 AM, Chuck Hill wrote:
>>>> On 2011-08-21, at 12:43 PM, Tim Worman wrote:
>>>>> On Aug 21, 2011, at 11:52 AM, Chuck Hill wrote:
>>>>>> On 2011-08-20, at 4:02 PM, Tim Worman wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Back in January I started this discussion on this same topic:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> http://lists.apple.com/archives/webobjects-dev/2011/Jan/msg00224.html
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> I have an app that, during the course of normal usage, is starting 
>>>>>>>>> httpd processes on the server that instantly hit 100% CPU usage of 
>>>>>>>>> one core. This can happen multiple times during times when the app is 
>>>>>>>>> under heavier load. After some time I can have many httpd processes 
>>>>>>>>> where TOP reports each using 100% of a core. When I try to log into 
>>>>>>>>> the app and poke around to try and reproduce the issue, I am unable.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> This is an update to my original post hoping to see if there are 
>>>>>>> anymore thoughts on origin. More recently, I have been able to 
>>>>>>> reproduce the issue in my own usage of the app - something I wasn't 
>>>>>>> able to do before. It seems to be easier to generate the issue now that 
>>>>>>> there are more ajax requests. The methods executed by these requests 
>>>>>>> are not intensive or long responses and should return a result in 
>>>>>>> seconds. Some symptoms:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> - When the actions are executed, busy indicators properly spin while 
>>>>>>> the browser awaits a response from the server. When the issue occurs, 
>>>>>>> the response never comes.
>>>>>>> - while continuing to await a response there is concurrently an httpd 
>>>>>>> process that pegs he processor at 100%
>>>>>>> - if I kill the process on the server, the browser immediately updates 
>>>>>>> properly as if the request had run properly
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> It's almost as if apache is somehow receiving an ill-formed request and 
>>>>>>> chokes on it. The problem is, there are no errors in the console or 
>>>>>>> anything strange in any apache logs. Has anyone ever seen behavior like 
>>>>>>> this or have any ideas as to how I could analyze it further? 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I've seen something like this.  It appeared that the woadaptor (i.e. 
>>>>>> mod_webobjects) did not believe that it had received all of the response 
>>>>>> from the application.  The app had nothing more to send and so the 
>>>>>> woadaptor just hung there waiting for data that would never come.  I did 
>>>>>> not track down why this happened, but it did seem to be load related.  
>>>>>> My suspicion was that there is a concurrency bug in the woadaptor.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I'm really at a loss about what to do about it. It's only gotten worse as 
>>>>> I've included more ajax actions in my app - and, of course, I don't 
>>>>> experience this behavior in development. I just deployed a major update 
>>>>> to my app - pretty much unaware that a small problem was going to become 
>>>>> a big problem with the new version.
>>>>> 
>>>>> In one example, a have a calendar where clicking on a day simply calls an 
>>>>> AjaxUpdate marking that date as selected to the calendar. The result also 
>>>>> has to update the entire page though because other things on the page 
>>>>> need to change in those circumstances. This alone can cause the issue - 
>>>>> but not always. And it happens even when I'm the only logged in user - so 
>>>>> the load isn't high.
>>>>> 
>>>>> As one solution, I've considered rolling a custom apache instead of using 
>>>>> Apple's. But since the server also runs shibboleth, the setup isn't 
>>>>> exactly simple. But I'm really not sure how to ascertain if the problem 
>>>>> is the woadaptor or how I can settle it.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> You could try the CGI adaptor and see if that makes any difference.  If it 
>>>> IS a bug in mod_webobjects...  that could be hard to find and fix.
>>> 
>>> Yeah, I'd say so. I don't even know C. :-) I'm gonna pursue some other 
>>> things first - like a possible hardware issue, or other software. I'm going 
>>> to try a deployment on another server and see if that has any effect - also 
>>> without shibboleth. Is there any chance that an issue with the id's of page 
>>> elements could cause an issue like this - say if they're dynamic and the 
>>> response doesn't find a matching id?
>> 
>> One other thing - if this was a bug in mod_webobjects, wouldn't a whole lot 
>> of projects being experiencing this same issue? Obviously, there are wo 
>> projects out there taking on a lot more load than mine. I have to think 
>> there is something about this specific deployment OR something about my 
>> specific requests that's causing my little hell here. Obviously, in wo, we 
>> don't construct our own requests in a fine-grained way so that is why I'm 
>> wondering about some of the elements on my pages.
> 
> 
> If it is a bug in the adaptor it has to be something very specific, maybe a 
> size or the value of some bytes at the start or end or the phase of the moon 
> or...  What platform do you deploy on?

What's the possibility that this could be related?

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Tool-causes-Apache-web-server-to-freeze-1330105.html

> Chuck
 _______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Webobjects-dev mailing list      ([email protected])
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com

This email sent to [email protected]

Reply via email to