weird technical issue with xalan

["Edward Q. Bridges" <ed...@buzznik.com>]

Below is a doGet method for a servlet that I'm having trouble with.
When I attempt to process a DOM Document using Xalan-J 1.0.1
where the Xalan-specific code is wrapped in a class (called HtmlRenderer),  
it occasionally returns nothing.  In other words, the http request to the 
servlet completes successfully (Status 200), I get back a complete set 
of headers, but there's no content after the headers.  This happens 
once in every 10 or so requests.  The webserver is a Apache 1.3.12 
running on my laptop running Linux.  I'm using Apache JServ 1.1, and 
the server is also configured to use mod_ssl and mod_perl.

I'm suspecting that this isn't really a Xalan issue, but rather a JServ/Apache 
issue.  But, I've never had any issues at all with
that until I started using Xalan;  and given that it works fine when
the below code is uncommented and the two lines referring to HtmlRenderer 
are removed, I can't honestly point the finger at Apache/Jserv just yet.

Note that the code in HtmlRenderer (which I can post if anyone likes) which 
deals with Xalan is identical to what I have below in comments.

Has anyone run into a similar sort of scenario?  Anyone have any ideas??

thanks in advance
--e--


public void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res)
   throws ServletException, IOException {
      res.setContentType("text/html");
      PrintWriter out = res.getWriter();
      String sql = "Select datetime 'now' as currenttime";

      try {
          /* DatabaseDom is a wrapper around a JDBC
           * Connection which converts a ResultSet into a DOM
           */
          DatabaseDom dom = new DatabaseDom( );
          Statement test = dom.createStatement();
          ResultSet rs = test.executeQuery( sql );
          Document d = dom.getDocument( rs );

      /*
      XSLTProcessor processor =
          XSLTProcessorFactory.getProcessor(new XercesLiaison());
      XSLTInputSource  xmlSource = new XSLTInputSource(d);
      XSLTInputSource  xslSheet  = new XSLTInputSource("file:/docs/httpd/lib/java/com/sheckys/xml/Test.xsl");
      XSLTResultTarget xmlResult = new XSLTResultTarget( out );
      try {
         processor.process(xmlSource, xslSheet, xmlResult);
      } catch (SAXException e) {
         out.println("<h2>Error: couldn't transform source: " + e.toString() +"</h2>");
      }
      */

      Renderer r = new HtmlRenderer(out,"file:/docs/httpd/lib/java/com/sheckys/xml/Test.xsl" );
      r.draw( d );

      } catch (Exception e) {
          System.err.println("Error constructing DatabaseDom: " +
             e.toString() );
          e.printStackTrace();
      }
}