Tomcat not recovering from runtime errors

[Jason Craft <ja...@activeink.net>]

Hello there,

We are having some problems with error recovery on one of our Tomcat 
implementations.

When Tomcat must handle a runtime error from a resource on our system (that 
is, an error the application hasn't handled), and the application resource 
that produced the error is requested again, the request to that resource 
will hang indefinitely. The browser will just sit there waiting, and the 
application will say nothing.

A couple of requests like this will crash Tomcat. It won't "crash" it in 
the sense that it eats up all its resources (memory or CPU time), but it 
will somehow block all other requests, so that they don't get through. They 
are "queued up" behind a request that won't finish.  We're a little 
perplexed by this, since we thought requests to Tomcat should concurrently 
be handled in separate threads.

Has anyone experienced a situation like this before?  Any thoughts on how 
to resolve it?

Thanks very much for your help,
Jason Craft