javax.servlet.ServletException: Session Object Internals: id : overflowed-session - websphere

I have a Portlet deployed on IBM Websphere Portal server and at busy times when I have a lot of users the Portal server is showing "this portlet is unavailable" when you hit it's Url.
In the logs the following exception is showing...
ServletWrappe E SRVE0068E: Could not invoke the service() method on servlet MyCystomPortlet. Exception thrown : javax.servlet.ServletException:
Session Object Internals:
id : overflowed-session
After doing some research on google I believe what is happening us that there are too many concurrent sessions. First of all can someone give me confirmation that this understanding is correct?
Secondly I believe there are settings in Websphere you can make around this. Maximum in memory session count. At the moment it's set to 1000. I would like to just increase it to 1500 but I am unsure of how to work out if this is too high and hence will risk the server falling over . Can someone please give me advice on this?
Lastly is reducing session timeouts in my portlet another effective way to try and fix this?
Thanks

Shortening shorter timeout will help if users are abandoning sessions without logging out, but its usually better to shorten it from default 30 min.
You can increase maximum sessions held in memory but you should also increase maximum heap size then. But make sure your operating system has enough memory resources to handle increased heap, because otherwise if system starts to swap you will have very poor performance.
So try to change that only for failing application (you can override session settings per application), do not change global settings in web container as they apply to all applications by default.

Related

502 server error in Google App Engine Flexible when load testing with JMeter

I have deployed a simple Spring boot app in Google App Engine Flexible. The app. has two APIs, one to add the user data into the DB (xxx.appspot.com/add) the other to get all the user data from the DB (xxx.appspot.com/all).
I wanted to see how GAE scales for the load, hence used JMeter to create a load with 100 user concurrency ramped up in 10 seconds and calls these two APIs in half a second delay, forever. While it runs fine for sometime (with just one instance), it starts to fail after 30 seconds or so with a "java.net.SocketException" or "The server responded with a status of 502".
After this error, when I try to access the same API from the browser, it displays,
Error: Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your
request. Please try again in 30 seconds.
The service is back to normal after 30 mins or so, and whenever the load test happens it repeats the same behavior as mentioned above. I expect GAE to auto-scale based on the load coming in to handle it without any down time (using multiple instances), instead it just crashes or blocks the service (without any information in the log). My app.yaml configuration is,
runtime: java
env: flex
service: hello-service
automatic_scaling:
min_num_instances: 1
max_num_instances: 10
I am a bit stuck with this one, Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
The solution was to increase the resource configuration, details below.
Given that I did not set a resource parameter, it defaulted to the pre-defined values for both CPU and Memory. In this case, the default
memory was set at 0.6GB. App Engine Flex instances uses about 0.4GB
for overhead processes. Given Java is known to consume higher memory, there is a
great likelihood that the overhead processes consumed more than the
approximate 0.4GB value. Now instances in App Engine are restarted due
to a variety of reasons including optimization due to memory use. This
explains why your instances went off and it shows Tomcat is starting
up (they got restarted) and ends up in 502 error due to the nginx is
not able to complete the request. Fixing the above may lessen if not completely eliminate the 502s.
After I have specified the resources attribute and increased the configuration in app.yaml 502 error seems to be gone.

Web application very slow in Tomcat 7

I implemented a web application to start the Tomcat service works very quickly, but spending hours and when more users are entering is getting slow (up to 15 users approx.).
Checking RAM usage statistics (20%), CPU (25%)
Server Features:
RAM 8GB
Processor i7
Windows Server 2008 64bit
Tomcat 7
MySql 5.0
Struts2
-Xms1024m
-Xmx1024m
PermGen = 1024
MaxPernGen = 1024
I do not use Web server, we publish directly on Tomcat.
Entering midnight slowness is still maintained (only 1 user online)
The solution I have is to restart the Tomcat service and response time is again excellent.
Is there anyone who has experienced this issue? Any clue would be appreciated.
Not enough details provided. Need more information :(
Use htop or top to find memory and CPU usage per process & per thread.
CPU
A constant 25% CPU usage in a 4 cores system can indicate that a single-core application/thread is running 100% CPU on the only core it is able to use.
Which application is eating the CPU ?
Memory
20% memory is ~1.6GB. It is a bit more than I expect for an idle server running only tomcat + mysql. The -Xms1024 tells tomcat to preallocate 1GB memory so that explains it.
Change tomcat settings to -Xms512 and -Xmx2048. Watch tomcat memory usage while you throw some users at it. If it keeps growing until it reaches 2GB... then freezes, that can indicate a memory leak.
Disk
Use df -h to check disk usage. A full partition can make the issues you are experiencing.
Filesystem Size Used Avail Usage% Mounted on
/cygdrive/c 149G 149G 414M 100% /
(If you just discovered in this example that my laptop is running out of space. You're doing it right :D)
Logs
Logs are awesome. Yet they have a bad habit to fill up the disk. Check logs disk usage. Are logs being written/erased/rotated properly when new users connect ? Does erasing logs fix the issue ? (copy them somewhere for future analysis before you erase them)
If not. Logs are STILL awesome. They have the good habit to help you track bugs. Check tomcat logs. You may want to set logging level to debug. What happens last when the website die ? Any useful error message ? Do user connections are still received and accepted by tomcat ?
Application
I suppose that the 25% CPU goes to tomcat (and not mysql). Tomcat doesn't fail by itself. The application running on it must be failing. Try removing the application from tomcat (you can eventually put an hello world instead). Can tomcat keep working overnight without your application ? It probably can, in which case the fault is on the application.
Enable full debug logging in your application and try to track the issue. Run it straight from eclipse in debug mode and throw users at it. Does it fail consistently in the same way ?
If yes, hit "pause" in the eclipse debugger and check what the application is doing. Look at the piece of code each thread is currently running + its call stack. Repeat that a few times. If there is a deadlock, an infinite loop, or similar, you can find it this way.
You will have found the issue by now if you are lucky. If not, you're unfortunate and it's a tricky bug that might be deep inside the application. That can get tricky to trace. Determination will lead to success. Good luck =)
For performance related issue, we need to follow the given rules:
You can equalize and emphasize the size of xms and xmx for effectiveness.
-Xms2048m
-Xmx2048m
You can also enable the PermGen to be garbage collected.
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled
If the page changes too frequently to make this option logical, try temporarily caching the dynamic content, so that it doesn't need to be regenerated over and over again. Any techniques you can use to cache work that's already been done instead of doing it again should be used - this is the key to achieving the best Tomcat performance.
If there any database related issue, then can follow sql query perfomance tuning
rotating the Catalina.out log file, without restarting Tomcat.
In details,There are two ways.
The first, which is more direct, is that you can rotate Catalina.out by adding a simple pipe to the log rotation tool of your choice in Catalina's startup shell script. This will look something like:
"$CATALINA_BASE"/logs/catalina.out WeaponOfChoice 2>&1 &
Simply replace "WeaponOfChoice" with your favorite log rotation tool.
The second way is less direct, but ultimately better. The best way to handle the rotation of Catalina.out is to make sure it never needs to rotate. Simply set the "swallowOutput" property to true for all Contexts in "server.xml".
This will route System.err and System.out to whatever Logging implementation you have configured, or JULI, if you haven't configured.
See more at: Tomcat Catalina Out
I experienced a very slow stock Tomcat dashboard on a clean Centos7 install and found the following cause and solution:
Slow start up times for Tomcat are often related to Java's
SecureRandom implementation. By default, it uses /dev/random as an
entropy source. This can be slow as it uses system events to gather
entropy (e.g. disk reads, key presses, etc). As the urandom manpage
states:
When the entropy pool is empty, reads from /dev/random will block until additional environmental noise is gathered.
Source: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/tomcat-8-5-9-restart-is-really-slow-on-my-centos-7-2-droplet
Fix it by adding the following configuration option to your tomcat.conf or (preferred) a custom file into /tomcat/conf/conf.d/:
JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom"
We encountered a similar problem, the cause was "catalina.out". It is the standard destination log file for "System.out" and "System.err". It's size kept on increasing thus slowing things down and ultimately tomcat crashed. This problem was solved by rotating "catalina.out". We were using redhat so we made a shell script to rotate "catalina.out".
Here are some links:-
Mulesoft article on catalina (also contains two methods of rotating):
Tomcat Catalina Introduction
If "catalina.out" is not the problem then try this instead:-
Mulesoft article on optimizing tomcat:
Tuning Tomcat Performance For Optimum Speed
We had a problem, which looks similar to yours. Tomcat was slow to respond, but access log showed just milliseconds for answer. The problem was streaming responses. One of our services returned real-time data that user could subscribe to. EPOLL were becoming bloated. Network requests couldn't get to the Tomcat. And whats more interesting, CPU was mostly idle (since no one could ask server to do anything) and acceptor/poller threads were sitting in WAIT, not RUNNING or IN_NATIVE.
At the time we just limited amount of such requests and everything became normal.

MVC3 memory management

What is the best way to check memory usage in an ASP.NET MVC3 application?
I have been told by my hosting provider to recyle the IIS application pool every so often to improve the speed of the site. Is this what is 'recommended practice'? Surely I shouldn't need to restart my application every so often? I'd much rather find out if it is an issue with memory usage in my application and correct it. So any tips & best practices you use would be quite helpful too.
The application is based on ASP.NET MVC3, C# and EF Code First. Any guidance, links appreciated.
EDIT:
I found this page after I posted, which is quite useful. But I'd still like to hear any other views.
ASP.NET MVC and EF Code First Memory Usage
Thank you
I have a site that never recycles (until the machine is rebooted weekly)
Your application generally should keep performing fine. If it doesn't, there is some leak.
This can occur because
Cache never expires
Cache never expires
Session storage keeps growing and never times out
ObjectContexts are never disposed and kept in the session, etc
Objects that should be disposed aren't
Objects that are created via a dependency injection container aren't setup to release after each request, and thus potentially have internal collections that keep growing.
There are more causes - but these are a few main ones.
So the question really is 'there is no best practice - it depends on your app'
If you are worried about current sessions during a restart, keep in mind a restart can be quick and current requests are allowed to finish (sometimes) and forms authentication tokens will survive the restart, however sessions will not unless you configure an out of process state server.
If your memory usage keeps growing, then setup a restart schedule, otherwise do once a week or never - or setup once memory goes to XYZ then reset. ASP.NET will restart automatically once a certain threshold is reached as well based on what the hoster has setup on memoryLimit:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7w2sway1.aspx
By default IIS recycles the application pool automatically at an interval (I think is 29 hours or so) but that is surely set by the host, no matter how little or how much memory you're the process is using. THe recycling trigger can be a time interval or when the process hits a certain memory usage limit. I'm sure any shared host has both of them set.
About memory usage, you can use the GC.GetTotalMemory method which will give you an approximate usage. Even when using Perfmon the readings aren't very accurate but it gives you an idea.
//global.asax.cs
void Application_EndRequest(object o,EventArgs a)
{
var ctype=Context.Response.Headers["Content-Type"];
if (ctype == null || !ctype.Contains("text/html")) return;
Context.Response.Write(string.format("<p>Memory usage: {0}</p>",GC.GetTotalMemory(false)));
}
Be aware that you'll see the usage increasing increasing until the GC kicks in and the usage will drop to a more 'realistic' value.
If you have the money I recommend a specialized tool such as the Memory profiler
Other things you can do to at least be ready if the application has memory or performance problems:
Proper layering of the application, means you can refactor the more inefficient parts without affecting the others.
The Repository pattern will be very helpful, because you can start using EF , find out that EF uses to much memory (like in the link you've found), but then you could switch the repository implementation to use PetaPoco or Dapper.net.
In general an OR\M is more of a heavy library, if the application doesn't need ORM features but just a quick way to work with a db, use from the beginning a mico-Orm like those mentioned above.
Always dispose objects implementing IDisposable.
When dealing with large db records, use pagination. It's good for both server resources usage and user experience
Apply the YAGNI (You Aint Gonna Need It) principle as much as possible, this somehow implies a bit of TDD :)

Log file writing extremely delayed in WebSphere App Server

I am experiencing an issue with delayed writes to the application logs for a Java EE web application running in IBM WebSphere v. 7.x. Logging statements taking up to an hour to appear in the application logs.
The problem doesn't appear related to heavy loads; WAS is responding to page requests almost instantly, and I am testing against a box that isn't used for performance testing, and on a holiday no less -- there is very little activitiy on the server.
My guess would be that the thread associated with logging has been configured with very low priority, but I cant figure out where that would be configured via the admin console or the configuration files.
Has anyone else experienced this sort of issue with WebSphere?
it's possible you don't even enough available threads in the thread pool. Its consistant with the page requests being fast, as they are controlled by the WebContainer threads.
Try increasing it:
Servers > Application Servers > Thread pools > ...
Not sure exactly which one to increase its max value. In worst case, increase'em all. Increase it heavily, so to be sure.
Other options:
make sure you enough disk space / try to connect with jConsole to inquire.

JSF Session management and tunning

All,
I am doing some investigation into how to shrink the amount of session memory our JSF application is consuming on a per user basis.
We are using MyFaces 1.1.7 and Tomahawk 1.1.5 running on IBM Websphere 7.0 patch 19. (Not able to upgrade either of these items at this time)
IBM’s guideline is that the session size should be less then 5k – average around 2.5k in order not to impact performance of the server and session replication. We are currently using Memory to Memory but looking at moving to database as suggested by IBM.
Our site was running at about 35M per user. We changed the number of view states from 100 to 10 and that dropped it down to around 4M.
We have several backing beans which are currently session scope and are looking at changing them to request scope.
I also found the following: http://www.econsulting.nl/images/pdf/Tuning%20JSF%20Applications-%20J-Spring%202008.pdf which seems to have a lot of information concerning how JSF handles certain content on the pages. This is still under investigation to make sure what is stated make sense.
I have also read somewhere that regardless if the managed backing bean is session or request scope is that the view state will still have the bean and its content. So the view state size will not change. Looking for clarification on this one.
The questions is are others facing the same issue in which JSF applications tend to consume a lot of memory for a given users session?
What are some of the best practices to reduce this size if any or is this just the way when using JSF?
Issues with session replication on IBM WebSphere when running a JSF application?
Is there any documentation out there on how JSF/MyFaces makes use of the heap memory - Young vs old or should it even be considered in this scope? Garbage collection tuning?
What we see as a result of this is that in the event a user hops to another server, the session data is not present due to how large the data is and how long it takes to replicate. User experience issues.
We had seen an issue in which it appeared that changes to the object in the session was not being updated correctly and have done some session management tuning in which we customize the settings so that all session attributes are written out. Looking at the .jar file it does appear that myFaces is making the call correctly when the contents of the object in the session changes. So WebSphere session listener should be picking up that change.
you can try saving view state on client, but I am not sure that MyFaces 1.1.7 already supports this

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