[技術] Tomcat的OutOfMemory issue

Written on 10:00 上午 by Yu Lai

最近在幫Pinter弄系統,發現Tomcat偶爾會噴OutOfMemory
的Exception出來,而在Console中也沒有辦法Trace出怎麼發生的。
Survey了一下才發現,原來除了存取大量的資料外,在Tomcat中使用
Singleton Pattern會有這類問題。

原因如下:
Hard references to classes can prevent the garbage collector from reclaiming the memory allocated for them when a ClassLoader is discarded. This will occur on JSP recompilations, and webapps reloads. If these operations are common in a webapp having these kinds of problems, it will be a matter of time, until the PermGen space gets full and an Out Of Memory is thrown.

而解決方法有三種:
Workaround 1: Move the class to another classloader
This workaround is for the case this class should be shared between webapps, or if the server will contain only one webapp. That is, we need to use the same instance across several webapps in the same server, or there is no need to worry about it. In this case, the class will need to be deployed on a shared classloader. This means this class must be in the shared/lib or shared/classes directory.

This way, the class will be loaded by a parent classloader, and not by the webapp classloader itself, so no resources need to be reclaimed on webapp reloadings.

This workaround may not always fit well with your code or design. In particular, care must be taken to avoid the singleton to keep references to classes loaded through the webapp classloader, because such references would prevent the classloader from being deallocated. A servlet context listener could be used to get rid of those references before the context is destroyed.

Workaround 2: Use commons-discovery
If you need to have a singleton instance for each webapp, you could use commons-discovery. This library provides a class named DiscoverSingleton that can be used to implement singletons in your webapp.

For using it, the class to be used as singleton will need to implement an interface (SPI) with the methods to be used. The following code is an example of usage of this library:

MyClass instance = DiscoverSingleton.find(MyClass.class, MyClassImpl.class.getName());
It is important, for this library to work correctly, to not keep static references to the returned instances.

Just by using this syntax, you get the following advantages:

Any class could be used as a singleton, as long as it implements an SPI interface.

Your singleton class has been converted into a replaceable component in your webapp, so you can "plug-in" a different implementation whenever you want.

But only this does not make for a workaround. The most important advantage is the DiscoverSingleton.release() method, that releases all references to instantiated singletons in the current classloader. A call to this method could be placed into a ServletContextListener, into its contextDestroyed() method.

That is, with a ServletContextListener simple implementation like the following:

public class SingletonReleaser implements ServletContextListener {
public contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event) { }

public contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent event) {
DiscoverSingleton.release();
}
}
we could release all cached references to the instantiated singletons. Of course, this listener should be registered on the web.xml descriptor before any other listener that could use a singleton.

Workaround 3: Use ServletContext attributes
This refactoring will work well provided the ServletContext instance is available, as a local variable or as a parameter.

It will be more efficient than using commons-discovery, but has the disadvantage of making your code depend on the web layer (ServletContext class). Anyway, I have found out that, in some cases, it is a reasonable approach.

There are many ways to do this refactoring, so I will just present one implementation that works well for me:

Create the following ServletContextListener:

public class SingletonFactory implements ServletContextListener {
public static final String MY_CLASS = "...";

/**
* @see ServletContextListener#contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent)
*/
public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event) {
ServletContext ctx = event.getServletContext();
ctx.setAttribute(MY_CLASS, new MyClass());
}

/**
* @see ServletContextListener#contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent)
*/
public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent event) {
ctx.setAttribute(MY_CLASS, null);
}

/**
* Optional method for getting the MyClass singleton instance.
*/
public static MyClass getMyClassInstance(ServletContext ctx) {
return (MyClass)ctx.getAttribute(MY_CLASS);
}
}
Register the listener in the web.xml descriptor

Replace the calls to MyClass.getInstance() by:

MyClass instance = (MyClass)ctx.getAttribute(SingletonFactory.MY_CLASS);

/* or, if implemented:
MyClass instance = SingletonFactory.getMyClassInstance(ctx);
*/

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