Axis webservice calls fail sometimes, access.log shows content!

Question

Hi,

our app is a webservice client (axis 1) to a third party webservice (also axis 1). We use it for some years now.

Since a few weeks, we (as a client) get sometimes HTTP status 400 (bad request) or read timeouts when calling the webservice.

Strangely, the access.log of the service shows part of the request or the response instead of the URL. It looks like this (looks like the end of the request string)

x.x.x.x -> y.y.y.y:8080 - - [timestamp] "POST /webservice HTTP/1.0" 200 16127 0
x.x.x.x -> y.y.y.y:8080 - - [timestamp] "POST /webservice HTTP/1.0" 200 22511 1
x.x.x.x -> y.y.y.y:8080 - - [timestamp] "il=\"true\"/><nsl:text xsi:type=\"xsd:string\" xsi:nil=\"true\"/></SOAPSomeOperation></soapenv:Body></soapenv:Envelope> Axis/1.4" 400 299 0

or (some string out of the what looks like the request)

x.x.x.x -> y.y.y.y:8080 - - [timestamp] ":string\">some text</sometag><othertag>moretext" 400 299 0

or in some other cases it looks like two requests thrown together (... means xml string left out):

x.x.x.x -> y.y.y.y:8080 - - [timestamp] "...</someop></soapenv:Body></soapenv:Envelope>:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\"...&lt;/soapenv:Body&gt;&lt;/soapenv:Envelope&gt;" 400 299 0

Application log does not give any hints. Frequency of such call is 1% of all calls to that service. The only discriminator I know of so far is that it happens since operations informed us that the service url changed because of "server migration".

Has anyone experienced such phenomenon yet? Has somebody got an idea whats wrong and how to fix?

Thanks,

Answer 1

We didn't have this exact behavior, but we faced several defects of Axis 1 that made us suffer a lot. One of the faulty classes was Axis' HttpSender, which appeared to be not thread-safe and also had a number of bugs.

Irregularity of your access log errors may mean that it's actually thread-safeness related. In any case if you have a chance to get rid of Axis 1, then do it immediatly. It is almost 5 years old and actually dead product with a lot of defects unfixed.