Wls 10.0 - intermittent 401 errors

Question

I have a simple HelloWorld servlet that is configured to use CLIENT-CERT as the authentication mechanism.
I am attempting to deploy this to a WLS 10.0 instance (though the problem I'm seeing also occurs under 9.2)
When I access the servlet once from my web browser everything works fine, the 2-way SSL handshake takes place and I get the output from my servlet.
However, if I attempt to access the servlet from multiple tabs concurrently, I get 401 errors intermittently. I can pick any one of the tabs that has a 401 error, hit 'reload' and get the correct output from the servlet.
I'm concluding that this problem shows up when too many concurrent authentication attempts are made I get the 401 errors.
This problem disappears if I remove the <security-contraint> section from the web.xml. This leads to the following questions:
1) If the <security-constraint> configures the servlet to allow any authenticated user (i.e the role specified maps to <principal-name>users</principal-name> in weblogic.xml) AND my WebLogic server is configured to require client certificates (and only listen on the SSL port), is the <security-constraint> serving any purpose?
2) How do I go about debugging this? Is this some sort of thread/resource issue that can be tweaked through WebLogic server settings somewhere?
Thanks in advance,
Bruce

Answer 1

Probably too late for an answer but I try,
We are not able to build our J2EE 1.4 application with weblo 10, we have to build them with weblo 8 which contains the xdoclet. then we deploy it in WL10. then sometimes we have to fix some build constraints that WL10 doesn't allow anymore.