On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 09:59:11AM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > There are several possible use cases, and I think we should try to > provide options to support each one.
Agreed. > Regardless of the startup timing, in all cases no request will > be served from an webapp until all initialization is done, including > load on startup servlets. There are 2 options here: > 1. Wait. The request will be delayed until the initialization completes. > The user will just see a slow request. > 2. 503. A response page with 'application is temporarily unavilable' or > 'starting' or 'refreshing' - eventually with a meta reload. Options are good, but I vote for "wait" to be the default behavior. (Supporting use cases are below.) There is a third option, by the way: 3. Wait with timeout. The request is queued, but if it takes longer than a specified time to process (say, 20 seconds), then it returns a 503. The third case actually subsumes the first two, since case 1 is enabled by setting the timeout very high, and case 2 is enabled by setting it very low (like 0). So I think this might be the best design choice: only one algorithm to implement, only one setting to configure. If I wanted to make a patch proposal, what source file(s) should I look at? It's been a while... --- Why I think Wait should be the default: Use cases: * Human UI: most naive users will tolerate a pause (of up to, say, 30 seconds) much better than they will understand that the proper response to a 503 is to wait a moment and then click reload. Instead, they will think "this site is down" and go to your competitor's :-) * Scripts: my test scripts launch Tomcat, then send a bunch of test requests and verify the results. A 503 will cause the tests to fail (unless I write special code to handle that case). Behavior seems to be mixed now -- there's a window where requests will fail, following which they will wait. There's also a condition where a request at just the wrong time will corrupt the webapp, causing all future requests to fail, but since I haven't been able to reproduce it I haven't reported it. -- Alex Chaffee mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] jGuru - Java News and FAQs http://www.jguru.com/alex/ Creator of Gamelan http://www.gamelan.com/ Founder of Purple Technology http://www.purpletech.com/ Curator of Stinky Art Collective http://www.stinky.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
