Blame the iSeries (was: Jetty, thread limit)

[David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Urbanek, Marty wrote:
> ... the "global limit" is within the application, not the OS (after a
> couple days of pointing fingers at the #*&$#^ iSeries guy ;-) ).

Heh ... a few years ago I spent about two weeks chasing down a problem 
with one of our Java applications that was using DB2 400 as it's 
database (java app, can use numerous different databases via JDBC).

The diagnostics were pretty sketchy, mainly some application level 
logging, but there was a distinct delay in certain operations that 
couldn't be explained.

Since DB2 400 was the ONLY thing that was really different about the 
configuration, they were 100% sure it was the iSeries that was causing 
the problem.

Since I am one of a very few people in the organization who knows both 
Java and iSeries, tracking the problem down in the DB2 400 specific code 
was assigned to me.  I dug into the problem for quite some time, getting 
IBM involved for a while, but couldn't figure out what the problem was.

Finally, after much frustration and hair pulling (and I don't have that 
much too pull), it was finally determined that the problem was actually 
due to their Novell LDAP server causing a serious authentication delay.

After the LDAP server was fixed, everything worked fine.

david