SilverStream server problems

[Simon]

Hi,

We've been running one of our web systems using SilverStream.

We've had this system for about 4 years and very little code has
changed.

In the last 3 months the server has been going down and produces a
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError exception.

Has anyone got any explanation as to why this is happening when little
code has changed??

One idea is that one of the function allows users have been adding new
records for 4 years and we allow users to find those records and we
have now over 130,000 records.

The find function allows users to select a criteria to narrow the
number of records returned, but could it be they are returning too
many records from the database and could that be killing the server???

If anyone has any idea of what else could be causing this then I would
appreciate it.

Regards
Simon

 

[Daniel Dyer]

Hi,

We've been running one of our web systems using SilverStream.

We've had this system for about 4 years and very little code has
changed.

In the last 3 months the server has been going down and produces a
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError exception.

Has anyone got any explanation as to why this is happening when little
code has changed??

One idea is that one of the function allows users have been adding new
records for 4 years and we allow users to find those records and we
have now over 130,000 records.

The find function allows users to select a criteria to narrow the
number of records returned, but could it be they are returning too
many records from the database and could that be killing the server???

Not being familiar with your application, we can only guess what's causing
the problem, you really need to fire up your profiler of choice and find
out what is accounting for all the occupied memory.

That "very little code" that has changed would be the first place to look.

Is it reading all the records at once? You should log how many records
are being read and see if that correlates with the OutOfMemoryErrors.

Does it look like a transient problem or a memory leak (is it something
that only happens after the server has been running for a while?)
Experimenting with the amount of memory available to the VM might help (an
increase may stop the problem from occurring, at least for now, a decrease
might make it easier to reproduce).

Dan.