Proxy to Tomcat 503 errors

[Daryl Stultz <daryl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I'm running Fedora Core 5, httpd-2.2.2-1.2 (worker MPM), Tomcat 5.5.17, Java jdk1.5.0_07. I have about 40 connections/apps from Apache to Tomcat like so:

ProxyPass /foo ajp://localhost:8009/foo/

I am getting a fair amount of 503 errors. Logs look like this:

Tomcat catalina.out
Mar 29, 2009 1:35:23 PM org.apache.jk.core.MsgContext action
WARNING: Error sending end packet
java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe

Apache ssl_access
xxx.xxx.xxx.102 - - [29/Mar/2009:13:35:18 -0400] "POST /foo/bar HTTP/1.1" 503 40920

Apache ssl_error
[Sun Mar 29 13:35:22 2009] [error] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.102] proxy: error processing body, referer: https://foo.bar.com/foo/bar
[Sun Mar 29 13:35:22 2009] [error] proxy: got bad response (5) from 127.0.0.1:8009 (localhost)

The times are not exact matches but the pattern is consistent. I don't know if this is a Tomcat problem or Apache/mod_proxy.

Can anyone give me some guidance here? Googling the log entries does't amount to much. The feedback on "java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe" seems to be that it's harmless, but it does coincide with Apache errors and ultimately 503, so I don't think it's a simple case of the user hitting the "stop" button.

Is there a perferred alternative to connecting Apache and Tomcat? Or is mod_proxy the best?

Thanks for the help.

-- 
Daryl Stultz
_____________________________________
6 Degrees Software and Consulting, Inc.
http://www.6degrees.com
mailto:daryl@xxxxxxxxxxxx