Weird JVM Crashing Issue with CF 9 on RedHat Enterprise Linux

Question

We're currently running ColdFusion 9 on a RedHat Enterprise Linux server and have found that, under certain circumstances, the JVM is crashing causing the CF server to be completely useless and requiring a full server restart.

The only error that's being returned by the CF app just prior to the JVM completing its death spiral is a java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException and it doesn't give too much additional information in the stacktrace. Has anyone else encountered a similar problem to this?

Based on some really old threads on House of Fusion (circa 2003) this was a problem that occasionally surfaced due to a caching problem. But, supposedly, that has been fixed in subsequent CF versions.

Anyway, I apologize in advance for the vagueness of this question but the errors we're getting back just before it crashes aren't particularly helpful.

We have not been able to replicate this problem on Windows, Mac or Ubuntu. Whenever the java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException error is thrown in any of those environments the JVM recovers just fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: Suffered a serious brain cramp this morning, we're running Enterprise Redhat not Enterprise Tomcat.

Answer 1

Why don't you try using a different JVM ? http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/547/2d547983.html

Answer 2

We are using the same JVM (bundled with cf9) in the Ubuntu, Windows, and Mac installations and the site behaves like you would expect, so I don't think that is the source of the problem at this point.

Answer 3

There are known memory issues when ColdFusion iterates over structs. Are you dumping or deep copying any large structures?

For example, the following has tanked my servers before:

<cfdump var="#mybigStruct#" />

Structs or not, to debug this stuff I found where the server was tanking using tried and true log statements, honing on the servers "last breath" to isolate the line of code causing the crash.