Have some issues with JBoss 7.1 been addressed in Wildfly?

[Al Koch]

Hi Francesco,

Thanks for visiting the forum and taking questions"!

I have two of your earlier JBoss 7 books (JBoss AS 7 Configuration, Deployment and Administration and JBoss AS 7 Development) and have found them to be very useful. I'd like to upgrade to Wildfly but I'm wondering about a couple of issues I've had with JBoss 7 and would like to know if these have been addressed in Wildfly. My JBoss 7.1.1 installation comes from the installation of jBPM 5 (jbpm-5.4.0.Final-installer-full.zip) which may be relevant. Also, the environment is a VMware workstation running Windows 7 with 5GB RAM that is hosted on an Intel i7 860 2.8 GHz machine. Finally, I am launching the server from Eclipse (Kepler).

1) When JBoss starts up it also automatically deploys six jBPM war modules (jbpm-human-task-war, jbpm-gwt-console, jbpm-gwt-console-server, jbpm-form-builder, drools-guvnor and designer). The startup takes over 5 minutes. Is this expected under JBoss 7.1.1 and would launch times be faster under Wildfly? I realize that if we are running in production mode we won't launch & deploy often, but on a development machine where we might have to do this several times a day, this does kill some time.

2) It often takes 3 to 4 attempts to launch JBoss 7. The Kepler console shows about 600+ lines of output but I cannot see anything that reveals why we fail to launch. All I do is try again and after a couple of tries we finally launch and deploy. Note however, on some days we do launch on the 1st try! Do you know if Wildfly will be more reliable when launched? Here is an excerpt:

11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015871: Deploy of deployment "jbpm-human-task-war.war" was rolled back with no failure message
11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015871: Deploy of deployment "jbpm-gwt-console.war" was rolled back with no failure message
11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015871: Deploy of deployment "jbpm-gwt-console-server.war" was rolled back with no failure message
11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015871: Deploy of deployment "jbpm-form-builder.war" was rolled back with no failure message
11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015870: Deploy of deployment "drools-guvnor.war" was rolled back with failure message {"JBAS014671: Failed services" => {"jboss.deployment.unit.\"drools-guvnor.war\".STRUCTURE" => "org.jboss.msc.service.StartException in service jboss.deployment.unit.\"drools-guvnor.war\".STRUCTURE: Failed to process phase STRUCTURE of deployment \"drools-guvnor.war\""}}
11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015871: Deploy of deployment "designer.war" was rolled back with no failure message

3) When JBoss 7 shuts down it leaves 2 folders in .\jboss-as-7.1.1.Final\standalone\tmp\vfs that consume over 1GB of space. Will Wildfly clean up these "temp" files when it shuts down to avoid this slow loss of disk?

Thanks very much for your help and I look forward to your new Wildfly book.

Al Koch

[Jaikiran Pai]

Al Koch wrote:
3) When JBoss 7 shuts down it leaves 2 folders in .\jboss-as-7.1.1.Final\standalone\tmp\vfs that consume over 1GB of space. Will Wildfly clean up these "temp" files when it shuts down to avoid this slow loss of disk?

Yes, this has been fixed in WildFly 8 https://issues.jboss.org/browse/WFLY-1547

[Jaikiran Pai]

Al Koch wrote:

1) When JBoss starts up it also automatically deploys six jBPM war modules (jbpm-human-task-war, jbpm-gwt-console, jbpm-gwt-console-server, jbpm-form-builder, drools-guvnor and designer). The startup takes over 5 minutes. Is this expected under JBoss 7.1.1 and would launch times be faster under Wildfly? I realize that if we are running in production mode we won't launch & deploy often, but on a development machine where we might have to do this several times a day, this does kill some time.

AS 7 (and WildFly) starts in a couple of seconds without any applications deployed. When applications are deployed it depends on what kind of applications those are and how they are implemented and that sometimes decides the boot up time. 5 minutes is a big time, you might want to check which of those applications is taking time. It might even be the case that the slowness is because of the VM. Have you tried it on a real machine?

[Jaikiran Pai]

Al Koch wrote:

2) It often takes 3 to 4 attempts to launch JBoss 7. The Kepler console shows about 600+ lines of output but I cannot see anything that reveals why we fail to launch. All I do is try again and after a couple of tries we finally launch and deploy. Note however, on some days we do launch on the 1st try! Do you know if Wildfly will be more reliable when launched?

AS7 and WildFly have a deployment timeout (which is configured in the standalone*.xml file) which rollback the deployment if they take too long to deploy. I think the default timeout was 5 minutes.

[Francesco Marchioni]

Al Koch wrote:

2) It often takes 3 to 4 attempts to launch JBoss 7. The Kepler console shows about 600+ lines of output but I cannot see anything that reveals why we fail to launch. All I do is try again and after a couple of tries we finally launch and deploy. Note however, on some days we do launch on the 1st try! Do you know if Wildfly will be more reliable when launched? Here is an excerpt:

11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015871: Deploy of deployment "jbpm-human-task-war.war" was rolled back with no failure message
11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015871: Deploy of deployment "jbpm-gwt-console.war" was rolled back with no failure message
11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015871: Deploy of deployment "jbpm-gwt-console-server.war" was rolled back with no failure message
11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015871: Deploy of deployment "jbpm-form-builder.war" was rolled back with no failure message
11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015870: Deploy of deployment "drools-guvnor.war" was rolled back with failure message {"JBAS014671: Failed services" => {"jboss.deployment.unit.\"drools-guvnor.war\".STRUCTURE" => "org.jboss.msc.service.StartException in service jboss.deployment.unit.\"drools-guvnor.war\".STRUCTURE: Failed to process phase STRUCTURE of deployment \"drools-guvnor.war\""}}
11:58:26,467 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 2) JBAS015871: Deploy of deployment "designer.war" was rolled back with no failure message

Hi Al,
sorry for late reply due to different time zones :-)
Well jaikiran already replied for two points. About point 2) I'd suggest at first investigating on the jBPM side, by upgrading your jBPM runtime. I've found some threads that are discussing about similar issues and managed to solve it by upgrading jBPM. Yet you should anyway include a deployment timeout when deploying jBPM artifacts to avoid locking up the application server.
Hope it helps
Francesco

[Al Koch]

Hi Jaikiran,

Thanks for your responses.

With respect to the slow start up, yes, I have tried the launch & deployment on "real hardware" and it still takes quite a while. You suggested that I try and ID which of the jBPM modules is "taking time". Can you suggest how I would do that? So much is going on in the console log that I'm not sure just taking the difference between the "starting" and "deployed" messages for each module would be accurate.

Thanks again.

Al

[Al Koch]

Hi Francesco,

Well, before I had time to read and reply to your response I got a notice that I won a copy of your new book! So, thank you for responding to my post and thanks VERY MUCH for making a copy of your book available. The timing is perfect because I'm planning on migrating from JBoss 7.1!

I have a follow up question about the server failing to start up a couple of times before it finally "gets going". I have been running with the default Eclipse server timeout of 450 secs (7.5 mins) and I haven't seen anything in the log about a "timeout" so I'm not sure that's the problem. You had suggested that I "upgrade my jBPM runtime". I'm running with 5.4.0 (installed from jbpm-5.4.0.Final-installer-full.zip) so I'm under the impression I have the latest that is available. Would you explain how I would upgrade?

Actually, there is one more (3 part!) question. In the case where I am launching the server "manually" (outside of Eclipse) on another system, I have seen that we fail to deploy the six jBPM modules and the log does say "Timeout" and the default is apparently 60 secs. Can you tell me:
1) Can this be set on the command line along with "standalone -b nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn -bmanagment nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn".
2) How is Eclipse setting this to 450 or was that a change made to the server config by the jBPM installation script?
3) How/where would I set this in the various config(s) files?

Thanks again for your help and also for your book!

Al

[Francesco Marchioni]

Hi Al!
sorry for late reply. Well as far as it concerns the main issue, that is deployment timeout, you can configure it via the deployment-timeout attribute. For example, the following CLI sets the deployment timeout to 100 seconds (default 60)

/subsystem=deployment-scanner/scanner=default:write-attribute(name="deployment-timeout ",value=100)

Although I have not tested it, you could use a BeanShell expression for the attribute and set it at server startup (for example via the -D argument):

  <deployment-scanner path="deployments" relative-to="jboss.server.base.dir" scan-interval="5000" deployment-timeout="${deployment.timeout:100}"/>

If you fail to start the application server due to an Eclipse timeout, I remember about writing it on a tutorial how to change the Eclipse timeout.
Lastly, about the jBPM upgrade unfortunately I cannot help further, I've come across this issue on the jBPM forums and I believed that an upgrade to jBPM 5.4 could help. Sorry.

Hope it helps,
Best regards
Francesco