Blank startpage under heavy load

[Johan Linder <jo...@srgonline.se>]

Hi!

We have a webapp running on 2003 Server, Tomcat 5.5.9 and JDK 1.5.0_03.

We're now moving to Linux and the app seems to work fine without  
load. But after just a couple of minutes running with load the server  
stops loading the start page (it loads - but it's blank!). No error  
messages under stdout/stderr. Most pages work, but the start page  
doesn't. If I just touch the class file for the start page, like:

$ touch tomcat/work/Catalina/localhost/webapp/org/apache/jsp/site/ 
page/page.class
the page loads again. We've tried JMeter to bombard the site to  
replicate the error, but it seems that we only get the error with  
"real" traffic.

System:
Linux www7 2.6.15-gentoo-r3 #2 SMP Wed Feb 8 15:53:16 CET 2006 x86_64  
Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.00GHz GNU/Linux

java version "1.5.0_06"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_06-b05)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.5.0_06-b05, mixed mode)

Tomcat 5.5.15
Started with:
         start-stop-daemon --start --nicelevel 0 --chroot ${CHROOT} -- 
exec ${TOMCAT_BIN}/jsvc -- \
                 -outfile ${TOMCAT_LOG}/stdout.log \
                 -errfile ${TOMCAT_LOG}/stderr.log \
                 -pidfile /tmp/tomcat.pid \
                 -user tomcat \
                 -home ${JAVA_HOME} \
                 - 
Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager \
                 -Djava.util.logging.config.file=${TOMCAT}/conf/ 
logging.properties \
                 -Djava.endorsed.dirs=${TOMCAT}/common/endorsed \
                 -classpath ${TOMCAT_BIN}/bootstrap.jar:${TOMCAT_BIN}/ 
commons-logging-api.jar \
                 -Dcatalina.base=${TOMCAT} \
                 -Dcatalina.home=${TOMCAT} \
                 -Djava.io.tmpdir=${TOMCAT}/temp \
                 -DPropertyHandlerFilePath=${TOMCAT}/webapps/webapp/ 
WEB-INF/classes \
                 -DPropertyHandlerFileName=WEB.properties \
                 -DPropertyHandler.Reload.Interval=604800000 \
                 -Djava.util.logging.config.file=${TOMCAT}/webapps/ 
webapp/WEB-INF/classes/logging.properties \
                 -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=${IP} \
                 -Dfile.encoding=Cp1252 \
                 -Xms1024m \
                 -Xmx1280m \
                 org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap

Kind regards,
// Johan

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to  
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying  
to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.  
- Rich Cook