@oracle team; forms server help desparately needed

Question

hi
my company is trying to migrate client machines to linux. our setup should be the following:
database <-> forms server <-> linux client with applet viewer
v9.2.....................v9i.................debian 3.0, j2sdk1.3
i am working on this setup for some months(!) now but i cannot get the clients to communicate stable with the rest of the setup.
problem: quite frequently the appletviewer will just hang and cause the forms server to create a
f90webm_dump_`$PID` file
in its working directory containing the following information:
[Mon Jan 20 21:58:29 2003 CET]::Client Status [ConnId=0, PID=10033]
>> Network connection to client failed: timeout on connection
the people working on the client machines are quite quickly inputting data into our databases. the appletviewer will hang more often on machines < 500 MHz but it also hangs on machines with more than 1.5 GHz and 512 MB DDR
i have literally tried everything:
i tried these java versions:
1.1, 1.3_x, 1.4.1 from sun, blackdown, ibm and even the one that came with the forms server on the clients
i tried to tune every setting on the forms server and in the jvm.cfg. i even tried to install the forms server on the clients so that i would have one tcp connection less to definitely exclude network failure as a possible reason.
i tried to use the PREEMPT_CLOSE setting, i even patched the kernels (low latency patch), analysed megabytes of debug logging, tried to strace the appletviewer to find WHY it keeps hanging!!!!
i tried to use different linux versions for best compatibility on the clients as well as on the forms server:
debian potato, woody, sarge, sid
suse 7.1, 7.2, 7.3
redhat 7.2, 7.3
i have read almost ALL documentation you could possibly read to find the reason of this problem.
dear oracle team
PLEASE just tell me that you have even tested this product and that you know how to make it work in a stable way. we can even pay you money to give us the solution. we have been using oracle forms for 7 years now and we want to stick with it. but our clients HAVE to be able to run the linux OS.
i have posted this problem 2 or 3 times already but somehow either noone seems to read this or noone has ever tried to use a three tier setup with linux on the middle and the client tier.
as i said i have wasted MONTHS already trying to get this to work and i am out of ideas what could cause this.
thanks for ANY reaction
armin walland

Answer 1

sorry for not responding a few days, i didnt have the possibility to do so.
if you access and run the application from a Windows
client using JInitiator, what happens.i have tried that of course and it seemed to be stable. (no hang in about 2 and a half days). i dont think it is a problem on the forms server itself...maybe just some setting that doesnt cooperate well with the appletviewer.
Since we don't
certify Forms9i with appletviewer, we didn't test it
there.thats what i thought to be honest....since you say "we"; do you work for oracle?
So first thing to do is to check if the
problem is a client issue or a server side problem.seems more like a client proble to me though....somehow it looks like some deadlock or race condition, but im not a programmer so this could be a completely wrong impression.
If youi can, can you try a test on a Windows client?as i said b4, we tried that and it seemed to work finely but it was to test the server and ensure it isnt a complete misconfiguration issue :)
rgds, armin