Am 2018-08-15 um 22:00 schrieb Jerry Malcolm:
On 8/15/2018 1:50 PM, Olaf Kock wrote:
Jerry,


On 15.08.2018 18:14, Jerry Malcolm wrote:
I have a mobile app that issues several http web service calls to initialize.  I was making them sequentially with no issues.  I then changed to give them all separate threads so they could load asynchronously.  Then the bottom fell out.  I started getting empty responses and some responses with results of three or four of the calls concatenated.  I traced the problem from the app back through apache through mod_jk and found the culprit to be Tomcat.

I'm a seasoned Tomcat developer for over 15 years.  I've never seen anything like this.  But it's really scary.  What I found is that sometime during the execution of one servlet call, it's thread data is swapped to thread data of another servlet call. I know this sounds like Twilight Zone.  But here is a log output. At the beginning of doGet(), I generated a random text string just to keep track of the thread data/:/

Thread: ajp-nio-8009-exec-24 uid: rclebgb -->
Thread: ajp-nio-8009-exec-29 uid: ceycfqd -->
Thread: ajp-nio-8009-exec-29 uid: ceycfqd <--
Thread: ajp-nio-8009-exec-24 uid: ceycfqd <--

Note that when thread 24 starts I store the "rcl..." uid. Another call comes in and starts thread 29.  By the time thread 24's servlet code is done, it now has thread 29's data.  (The uid is just a quick variable for reference.  The request object, response object, EVERYTHING is now thread 29's data).

This explains why I'm getting empty responses and other response with the data for multiple requests concatenated together.  The "rcl..." instance data has totally disappeared, and all of the server calls are now using the "cey..." instance data (i.e. response object).

I figure this is some sort of timing/race condition that only occurs with a second call coming in while the first call is still in progress. I can go back to sending the mobile app calls serially and probably work around this.  But this is a huge problem.

Any ideas?  (BTW... Tomcat 9.0.7)


As we don't know which code generates this log output, it's hard to judge what actually causes your problem. You say "thread data" is being swapped, and the very first aspect that comes to my mind is: Servlets are inherently multithreaded, and a common pattern of bugs is if a servlet has a member variable that is used for request processing: There typically is only one Servlet object ever, thus they all share the same state, if the state is stored in a member variable. This might be directly in the servlet or in some other component or singleton somewhere.

Any state and request processing must be done on the request/response pair, and properly threadsafe in every other part of your code.

And most likely this is an issue that luckily shows up when you're issuing a lot of parallel threads due to parallelizing one client. It'd be a lot harder to reproduce if it were individual users, who (very) occasionally see the wrong data. Consider yourself lucky to have such a nice and reproducible issue.

Olaf

Olaf,

I'm having a bit of trouble feeling "lucky" that I have a problem that is catastrophically blocking my development progress toward a deadline.....

I'm not sure what you mean by typically there is only one servlet object.  There's one class.  But a new instance is created on each request, right?  And all instance variables should be scoped to that instance alone, right?  It's fundamental to Java that a private local variable can't arbitrarily change to another value in the middle of executing a method other than by the local code changing it itself, right?  Yet uid (and all the other variables including request and response) changed.. somewhere between the beginning and ending of doGet().   !! I'm not doing any singleton stuff.  Simply request-->Servlet-->response.

My servlet code is very basic.  It is not multithreaded.

public class MyServlet(....) {
private String uid;    // <==== PRIVATE access!!

Oh hell, this is so wrong. The servlet instance exists only once in the webapp classloader. No one is creating a new instace on each an every request. You *cannot* share a variable like that, it is not threadsafe.

This is your problem. You have to fix that. You also *must* review the rest of your code. Here is your exact problem: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2184147/696632. Trust Bauke Scholz!

Michael


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