Question

We have an external system (not under my control) which has a Http Service running on it and we can invoke the service using Java’s HttpURLConnection object. Now, for some reason the service crashes upon invocation of a specific request. Am wondering as to what can be the likely causes of Http Service to crash from the client perspective other than lets say resource hogs like a connection leak. Note that this happens when it is called many times (over 50) at the same time and not under less load. Would highly appreciate if anyone can provide recommendations around the same.

Answer 1

This is impossible to answer except with generalities.

It looks like you are overloading the service, and an overloaded service can potentially crash for any number of reasons including:

• resource leaks triggered by overload
• resource starvation (due to doing too many things at once)
• incorrect handling of timeouts and other errors cause by overload
• synchronization bugs (race conditions, dead-locks, etc) that are triggered by overload
• overloading of backend services
• and so on.

I can’t see how enumerating the possibilities is going to help you. You should really be talking to the people who control the service that you are overloading. Ask them how many concurrent calls your client should be making.

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Would highly appreciate if anyone can provide recommendations around the same.

My recommendation is to reduce the number of requests you are making in parallel. The service (any service!) can only cope with a certain number of requests per second. If you exceed that capacity you won’t get better service. On the contrary, you are likely to cause performance problems that will significantly reduce the service’s throughput … or even crash it.

Use your common sense. Be a good network citizen.