java.io.IOException: broken pipe causing Tomcat to crash

[Eric Furze <er...@netascension.com>]

I've been load testing a servlet which uses ObjectStreams to communicate with client applets over HTTP.  All requests are being forwarded to Tomcat from Apache using mod_jserv with the ajpv12 connector.  Under high loads (~80 requests/sec) I intermittantly but consistently get the following error logged to my application's logfile: 

    java.io.IOException: Broken pipe.  

The exception occurs in the following code:

   HttpServletResponse res
   OutputStream out = res.getOutputStream();
   obOutStream = new ObjectOutputStream(out);
   obOutStream.writeObject(msg);
   obOutStream.flush();
   obOutStream.close();

I believe it happens at the writeObject() call and yes, I am properly wrapping this all in a try/catch block.

The exception always causes Tomcat to become unresponsive - I can't shut it down with the shutdown.sh script, and it no loger responds to client queries.  I suspect that either tomcat or the JVM is going into a busy loop somwhere because `top` always reveals that I have two java processes which are consuming 75% and 25% of the CPU respectively.  My enviroment is:

Redhat 6.2
Sun JDK 1.3.0
Tomcat 3.2 release
Apache 1.3.14
PIII 800, 256M RAM

I'm using the PoolTcpConnector AJPV12 connector with the default thread settings (50 max, 25 max spare, 10 min spare).

It seems clear to me that this is a bug in Tomcat - even if my servlet is doing something wrong Tomcat shouldn't choke because of it.  Anyone have any ideas what could be causing this?  *Any* workarounds would be greatly appreciated!

Incidentally, the reason I'm using mod_jserv is that I've been unable to get mod_jk to work with ajpv13 - for some reason the autogenerated mod_jk.conf-auto always uses ajpv12.  Anyone know how to change this?

Thanks!

Eric