Hashtable locks after cgiscope.resolve in cfapplication tag

Question

Hi,
Running (IIS 6, Windows 2003, coldfusion 7.02)
I have been trying to tune our servers already for a while
and fixed quite a few bottlenecks. At the moment i trying to solve
a problem which delays (Running requests shoot up till maximum,
requests start queing upto 60 or above) our servers for periods of
1 to 5 seconds, and this can appear regularly (every 3-5 seconds)
and sometimes the server will not experience the problem for a
while (a minute, sometimes even longer). We have upto about 55
page/hits per seconds on our sites.
See the attached code for some stack traces.
Although the lock in application line 1 (cfapplication tag)
occupies 80% of the thread dump, we get also the same kind of lock
where cfparams, isdefined and unscoped variables are in the code,
these look sometimes a bit different, but its always a HashTable
object (like NoCaseContainer). And its also always happens in the
execution of coldfusion.runtime.cgiscope.resolve.
One more thing, the thread dump is full of threads 'waiting
for lock', but i can never find a thread that says 'locked' on that
hashtable object. So there does not seem to be any thread locking!
I have scoped cfparams and isdefined's that appeared the most
in the thread dumps, and it helped, they dont appear in the threads
dumps anymore. But now it seems that only the <cfapplication>
tag appears (which is on line 1), and this causes just as much
locks, it doesn't seem to make the locking any less than before.
So my question is, should i scope every single variable in my
application (this is going to be a lot of work), should i remove
all CGI variables from the application.cfm page (i did this, and it
does not seem to have any affect).
And, why does <cfapplication> access the CGI scope? Is
this normal behaviour? And if yes, is it normal it causes so much
locking (note: we have here and their some bad application scope
locks hanging around but i did not fix them because these pages
never appear in stacktraces).
Also i included a few stacktraces that acces the file system,
i have the idea these appear after a page gets through the lock
after the execution of coldfusion.runtime.cgiscope.resolve and just
because accessing the file system is a slow process it appears also
in the stack traces. But let me know if you think im wrong about
this.
I hope somebody can help me fixing this.
Klaas-Jan

Answer 1

The jsp code should look like the following in order to keep your value selected:
&lt;td width="200" id="SelectedType" class="select"&gt;
&lt;f:invoke var="${tester}" methodName="populateType" retAttName="types" retAttScope="Page"/&gt;
&lt;select id="tester.type" class="select" &lt;f:fieldName att="tester.type"/&gt;&gt;
&lt;c:forEach var="type" begin="0" items="${types}"
varStatus="status"&gt;
*&lt;option value="&lt;c:out value="${type}"/&gt;"&lt;c:if test="${type == tester.type}"&gt;selected="selected"&lt;/c:if&gt;&gt;*
&lt;c:out value="${type}"/&gt;
&lt;/option&gt;
&lt;/c:forEach&gt;
&lt;/select&gt;
&lt;/td&gt;
Thanks,
Adam DesJardin
Avio Consulting