Lots of seemingly dead tomcat processes

[Andrew Garrett <ma...@gmail.com>]

Hi All.

I've got a bit of an issue with a tomcat installation - I have an ever
increasing number of processes, and the system users complain of
intermittant slow performance.  When a particular request is taking a
long time (generally not responding at all - timing out after a couple
of minutes) a page-refresh will generally generate a response in a
normal time frame (on the order of 1-2 seconds).  To me, this is
symptomatic of a particular request hitting a dead tomcat process,
while the refresh (being a different request) hits a different tomcat
process, which responds in a more normal time.

I'm a sys-admin type, not a developer, and my tomcat-foo is reasonably
weak (but getting stronger, the more I do with it, of course).

The system is running on a dual processor 2.8 GHz Xeon box, with 4 gig of ram. 
Base OS is Debian GNU/Linux
I'm using the JRockit JVM, and Tomcat 5.0.27
The JVM and tomcat are in a chroot jail
The tomcat server is making SOAP calls to another machine, and talking
directly to an MS-SQL box - both the machine to which it makes the
SOAP calls and the MS-SQL box show no indications of load.
When tomcat is freshly restarted, I have 44 tomcat processes (ps ax |
grep jrockit | wc -l).  Over time (a number of days) this increases,
until it hits around 245 processes, and it goes no higher than this.

What I'm looking for is some sort of solution - either some tomcat
setting I'm unfamiliar with that might be causing this, or some way
outside of Tomcat

I can put a band-aid style fix in place - restarting tomcat every X
days, but that's uglier than I'd like - I'd far rather identify and
fix the problem, than do scheduled restarts.

Any assistance or suggestions that any kind soul can offer would be
greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Andrew

-- 
They sicken of the calm;              http://scroll.redemption.co.nz/
That know the storm.               http://www.gadgets-weblog.com/

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: tomcat-user-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: tomcat-user-help@jakarta.apache.org