[fedora-java] J2SE5.0 running on Fedora Core 4

[Mike Bonnet]

> For the 1st time, i am planning to install J2SE5.0 on Fedora Core 4 to 
> run Tomcat5.5. Is there anything that i should be aware of...any 
> experience ?

I've recently seen issues running Tomcat under Sun J2SE 5.0 Update 3 on
RHEL3 and RHEL4 (I haven't tried to reproduce the problem on FC4).  It
appears to be a bug in the garbage collector, so I would expect to see
the same behavior on FC4.  When running under heavy load, the garbage
collector thread would segfault, crashing the whole JVM.  A gdb
backtrace looked like this:

(gdb) bt
#0  0xb6f7cad4 in OopTaskQueueSet::steal_best_of_2 () from /opt/jdk1.5.0_03/jre/lib/i386/server/libjvm.so
#1  0xb6f7c882 in OopTaskQueueSet::steal () from /opt/jdk1.5.0_03/jre/lib/i386/server/libjvm.so
#2  0xb6f3f3ed in StealTask::do_it () from /opt/jdk1.5.0_03/jre/lib/i386/server/libjvm.so
#3  0xb6d13baf in GCTaskThread::run () from /opt/jdk1.5.0_03/jre/lib/i386/server/libjvm.so
#4  0xb6f03a78 in _start () from /opt/jdk1.5.0_03/jre/lib/i386/server/libjvm.so
#5  0xb75cfde8 in start_thread () from /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0
#6  0xb756c93a in clone () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6

When running with about 15 concurrent, processor-intensive requests, the
crash was reproducible in about 5-10 minutes.  I only saw this crash
when running with the "server" JVM (auto-selected in J2SE 5.0 if your
machine has more than one processor or > 2G or RAM, or via the -server
command-line flag), preliminary tests using the "client" JVM could not
reproduce the error.

You may not run into this problem at all, based on your particular
application, but it's something to keep an eye open for.