JSF Page goes blank in performance testing

[Aakash Saxena]

Hi

I am currently working on a single page jsf 2.0 based web application. In this application, we make web service call and retrieve data from JAX WS webservice response and exploit it to show more than one dynamic forms on front end.
Basically depending upon the user, we can show multple forms of front end. A user can take action on these forms and each form submit will e an ajax call.

1) We are using IBM Websphere App Server 8.5 which has a support for JSF 2.0 , that means we don't add any explicit jsf jars as server lib has jsf specific jars.

2) The only managed bean in my code has SESSION scope and javax.faces.STATE_SAVING_METHOD in web.xml is set to SERVER. The data we keep in session would be atleast 8-10 KB.

3) To manage view expired exception, we have written an exception handler like code shown below :

package com.sun.faces;
 
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.Map;
import javax.faces.FacesException;
import javax.faces.application.NavigationHandler;
import javax.faces.application.ViewExpiredException;
import javax.faces.component.UIViewRoot;
import javax.faces.context.ExceptionHandler;
import javax.faces.context.ExceptionHandlerWrapper;
import javax.faces.context.FacesContext;
import javax.faces.event.ExceptionQueuedEvent;
import javax.faces.event.ExceptionQueuedEventContext;
 
public class ViewExpiredExceptionExceptionHandler extends ExceptionHandlerWrapper {
 
    private ExceptionHandler wrapped;
 
    public ViewExpiredExceptionExceptionHandler(ExceptionHandler wrapped) {
        this.wrapped = wrapped;
    }
 
    @Override
    public ExceptionHandler getWrapped() {
        return this.wrapped;
    }
 
    @Override
    public void handle() throws FacesException {
        for (Iterator<ExceptionQueuedEvent> i = getUnhandledExceptionQueuedEvents().iterator(); i.hasNext();) {
            ExceptionQueuedEvent event = i.next();
            ExceptionQueuedEventContext context = (ExceptionQueuedEventContext) event.getSource();
            Throwable t = context.getException();
            if (t instanceof ViewExpiredException) {
                ViewExpiredException vee = (ViewExpiredException) t;
                FacesContext fc = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
                Map<String, Object> requestMap = fc.getExternalContext().getRequestMap();
                NavigationHandler nav =
                        fc.getApplication().getNavigationHandler();
                try {
                    // Push some useful stuff to the request scope for
                    // use in the page
                    requestMap.put("currentViewId", vee.getViewId());
 
                    nav.handleNavigation(fc, null, "viewExpired");
fc.getExternalContext.redirect("/sessionTimeoUT.XHTML");
                    fc.renderResponse();
 
                } finally {
                    i.remove();
                }
            }
        }
        // At this point, the queue will not contain any ViewExpiredEvents.
        // Therefore, let the parent handle them.
        getWrapped().handle();
 
    }
}

3) When we started the performance testing using LOAD RUNNER with 30 users and 5 TPAs, the application runs fine for 7-8 minutes and then all of a sudden page goes blank.
Over all application worked fine for first 900 - 1000 requests.

4) On analyzing logs I found :

 javax.faces.FacesException : java.lang.IllegalStateException at org.apache.myfaces.shared_impl.context.ExceptionHandlerImpl.wrap(ExceptionHandlerImpl.java:241) at org.apache.myfaces.shared_impl.context.ExceptionHandlerImpl.handle

5) Once this excetion has come, even if i hit the application manually, the same exception long gets printed every time.

6) I googled a bit and found known issues of JSF 2.0 - JSF 2215 and JSF 2277.

Do you think my problem has anything to do with JSF 2215 and JSF 2277 issue ?

7) On of the solution to JSF 2215 and JSF 2277 suggests upgrading to Mojarra 2.1.8 but since my jsf libs were inside IBM WAS 8.5 lib i wonder if my organization will let me do that.
Any alternate solutions are welcome.
Kindly suggest how should I proceed and fix this issue.

Thanks

[Aakash Saxena]

Ok found the reason for the glitch. On IBM Was 8.5 maximum in memory session count was set to 1000 due to which after creating 1000 sessions, I was getting IllegalStateException. We just increased the size today and it started working fine.

By the can anyone let me know how i can calculate the size of the session scope managed bean ? Based on tis size we want to take a call on how much RAM per JVM we should use.