We upgraded our internet-facing web server from Tomcat 5.5.9 to 5.5.15 this weekend and have run into a number of intermittent connectivity problems which have resulted in rolling back to 5.5.9. We use the Tomcat HTTPS connector (without an intermediate web server between the clients and Tomcat) with all of the default configuration. Issue 1: A couple of our clients have experienced intermittent connectivity problems (where approximately 1 out of every 20 page loads results in an immediate "Page Cannot Be Displayed" error in Internet Explorer - it appears that Tomcat immediately rejects the connection). Issue 2: Also, during peak loading (although we're only talking about 30 to 40 concurrent users here) Tomcat appears to hang for a while and make new connections wait for up to 1 minute before returning a page. Throughout this time processor load has been consistently < 20%. (The server is a dual Xeon processor, dual core machine, running Windows 2003 Server). The first problem we've seen before when we used to use Apache (with the JK connector) to deliver the HTTPS pages - I suspect the compatibility with Apache/OpenSSL's implementation of SSL and Internet Explorer's implementation of SSL are still slightly incompatible. (I believe this is a known issue on a Windows platform but has never been resolved). The second problem (with Tomcat not responding to new HTTPS requests quickly under moderate load) is new on me. I'm not really able to submit this as a bug to the Tomcat team as out-of-hours we've been unable to recreate this (even simulating a high load using JMeter), and the "Page Cannot Be Displayed" issue only occurs with certain brands of proxy server (Secure Computing's Sidewinder seems particuiarly sensitive to this). Also, there's no errors The only conclusion I can draw right now is that if you want to use Tomcat to deliver HTTPS content from a Windows-based server, stick with Tomcat 5.5.9. Has anyone else had a similar experience? Richard ___________________________ Richard Mundell The Roberts Group Market Data Expertise that FITS. +1 212 499 2680 x20 (office) www.trgrp.com
