I have a free bsd server running jserv. It has a servlet running which
receives requests from websites. Now, there is a javscript on the
website which contacts the servlet running on the server every 5
seconds to tell the server that the user is there. Whenever there is a
new person, the server creates a new session. Now I have only this
running and i have noticed that the max cpu usage is reached to 20% of
java and lot of memory is free. Inspite of this jserve keeps booting
sometimes every half hour, sometimes every hour and calls the init of
all the servlet and hence leads to disruption of the service. If
anybody has idea about jserve settings, please advice what can be
changed to avoid these bootups.

Amit

Amit,

I have a few questions for you:

When you say that "jserve keeps booting" do you mean that it is crashing 
and being restarted? 

If so, and you believe your servlets aren't doing anything they shouldn't, 
then obviously we have a jserv issue. This wouldn't surprise me, since 
jserv is fairly old and I've found it to be a little flaky. If it's an 
option then you might consider upgrading to another servlet engine. 
Several options are listed here:

http://www.servlets.com/engines/index.html

I believe the best free options would be Jakarta Tomcat or Jetty. Resin
is good but has some licensing complications.

If you really need to use jserv then I'd need to see your servlet code 
and any relevant logs before I could help in trying to determine why
jserv is crashing.

OK, the above assumed that jserv is crashing and being restarted. If it's
not, and the issue is simply that your init methods are being called, then
this is actually allowed under the servlet specification. Your servlets 
shouldn't rely on any instance variables, so should be unaffected if one
instance is destroyed and another created in its place. Any sessions 
created should still be available however. Again I need a little more 
information on what you mean by "disruption of the service".

Cheers,

Eadfrith

Yes jserve is restarting again and again. We cannot upgrade to tomcat
as jserve seems fine till now and we have had not had any issues up
until now. problem is every time the restart happens, the old sessions
in the server die away and new ones are created which disrupts the
whole working. It is just not the question of inits, we cannot keep a
session going when the jserve is rebooting. we have not made out any
thing from the jserve logs apart from the notice that the inits keep
getting called again and again. ANybody who has through working of
jserve and its properties should be able to help out telling us what
to see where and where does the problem lie. Our servlets being so
huge running in multiple pages, it is difficult to track where the
problem lies until some tracking software can be put which can examine
things internally and tell us what is going wrong cause the restarts
are not scheduled..they sometimes happen in every 10 minuts then dont
happen for 10 hours. Its very difficult to know what is triggering it.
Any ideas would be really helpful?

Amit