No response due to long running Action classes

Question

Hi,
I have a small issue in my application.
Please help providing the solution for the following problematic scenario faced in my application.
My project is generally a report generation project,
arch used: our-own architecture(similar to struts)
Server: deployed in tomcat server..
On clicking a button from X.jsp, it triggers the action with the request = REQ1
so in my configuration Xml file it checks for it and executes the corresponding Action classes and it should display the Presentation(Jsp)
What happens is , the action class execution is taking more than 10 min, becaz of which i am getting blank screen.
From the action to jsp , it is executing without any error, which i could see in the log files..
Actions taken:
improved the performance of the query, but cudnt reduce much time..
session time is 180min, and connection timeout set to an hr. - No change- It seems this doesnt have to do anything with this.
my Observance:
I guess, as per arch, it is executing till jsp, but it seems that HttpRequest is getting timedout becaz of long running actions.
Please help to find the cause and approach method to resolve this issue.
Note: no issues to wait till 10min.. but need to get the values (reports) in the screeen..
Thanks in advance.....

Answer 1

It sounds like either the server or perhaps a firewall is timing out after 5 minutes or so. If you can examine the log files for each such machine in the network, you might find that one is reporting a timeout. If this is the case, you can change the timeout to something greater than 5 minutes, but this is not advisable. Other applications should rightfully timeout if they 'hang' for more than 5 minutes or so and you don't want to interfere with that. One possible solution is to look up something like 'jsp keepalive' to see how to get the JSP page to periodically send a message to the server to keep the session alive using something like AJAX. I tried this and I couldn't find anything that worked. Another thing you can do is do performance tuning to speed things up, or only fetch a small subset of data for the user at a time by filtering (example: instead of returning the entire telephone book, have the user select A to Z for last name and only return the last name that begins with that letter. Another possibility is to cache the data and read from the cache. Then, periodically, refresh the cache from the database at say, midnight every night. Those are the only ideas I have.