Hello,

I am struggling with some horrible intermittent OrbixWeb problems. The
version of OW is 3.0.1, and ancient, buggy, unsupported version. In
the fullness of time we will move off CORBA completely and use JMS but
for now there is a problem and changing the version of OW or even the
ORB is not an option.

Every now and then our server fails to startup. The error is an
exception from impl_is_ready. It is shown below. To make the problem
go away we just keep restarting things until it works. We dont usually
have to try many times before it works but of course, we should not
have to do this at all.

Two things have changed since the env in which things work. One is
that I have rewritten the server from ancient C++ to Java so it is now
using OW rather than Orbix. We still have another C++ server so we are
using the orbixd deamon instead of the java one. We just rig the
startup script to fire up the JVM with the parameters that Orbix needs
for auto-launch to work (undocumented, sadly, deep sigh). The other
change is we now have 3 servers where we used to have just one. One of
the servers retains its original NS name, the others have either '2'
or '3' appended to the NS name. This provides a crude form of load
balancing. When we start the 3 servers most of time there is no
problem, but every now and then one of them fails with the error. Last
night we were really unlucky and two of them failed with this error.
We have never had all 3 fail at the same time. Yet.

I wonder if anyone can shed any light on what this exception means. My
guess is that it might be OW-specific.

Here is the stack trace:

31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,025 ERROR [main]  RouterServiceServerOrbix:
org.omg.CORBA.COMM_FAILURE: Communication failure     select error
   Reason: (unknown)
31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,027 ERROR [main] STDERR:
org.omg.CORBA.COMM_FAILURE: Communication failure    select error
Reason: (unknown)
31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,028 ERROR [main] STDERR:   at
IE.Iona.OrbixWeb.CORBA.ExceptionHelper.new_COMM_FAILURE(ExceptionHelper.java:
218)
31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,028 ERROR [main] STDERR:   at
IE.Iona.OrbixWeb.CORBA.Listener.Bind(Listener.java:135)
31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,029 ERROR [main] STDERR:   at
IE.Iona.OrbixWeb.CORBA.EventHandler.newListener(EventHandler.java:130)
31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,029 ERROR [main] STDERR:   at
IE.Iona.OrbixWeb.CORBA.EventHandler.<init>(EventHandler.java:108)
31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,030 ERROR [main] STDERR:   at
IE.Iona.OrbixWeb.CORBA.BOAImpl.initEventHandler(BOAImpl.java:351)
31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,032 ERROR [main] STDERR:   at
IE.Iona.OrbixWeb.CORBA.BOAImpl.readyEventHandler(BOAImpl.java:376)
31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,032 ERROR [main] STDERR:   at
IE.Iona.OrbixWeb.CORBA.BOAImpl.processEvents(BOAImpl.java:453)
31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,033 ERROR [main] STDERR:   at
IE.Iona.OrbixWeb.CORBA.BOAImpl.impl_is_ready(BOAImpl.java:796)
31-Jan-2008 20:38:50,033 ERROR [main] STDERR:   at
IE.Iona.OrbixWeb.CORBA.ORB.impl_is_ready(ORB.java:1034)

Regards,

Andrew Marlow