Coldfusion server error - Corrupt form data: premature ending

[Comcar Tech]

I've got a problem with our live server. Occasionally a page will not load, and the following error is displayed in plain black text on a white background:

     Server Error

     The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request

     Application server is busy. Either there are too many concurrent requests

If I look in the error log for the website, at the time of the error using the following command:

     grep "12:17:33" error_log

lines such as this are returned:

     [Tue May 03 12:17:33 2011] [notice] jrApache[14352: 21512]  returning error page for JRun too busy or out of memory

Then if I search in the Coldfusion cfserver.log I find these errors, a few seconds before hand:

05/03 12:17:29 error Corrupt form data: premature ending

java.io.IOException: Corrupt form data: premature ending

        at com.oreilly.servlet.multipart.MultipartParser.<init>(MultipartParser.java:177)

        at com.oreilly.servlet.multipart.MultipartParser.<init>(MultipartParser.java:99)

        at coldfusion.filter.FormScope.fillMultipart(FormScope.java:190)

        at coldfusion.filter.FusionContext.SymTab_initForRequest(FusionContext.java:369)

        at coldfusion.filter.GlobalsFilter.invoke(GlobalsFilter.java:33)

        at coldfusion.filter.DatasourceFilter.invoke(DatasourceFilter.java:22)

        at coldfusion.filter.CachingFilter.invoke(CachingFilter.java:53)

        at coldfusion.filter.RequestThrottleFilter.invoke(RequestThrottleFilter.java:126)

        at coldfusion.CfmServlet.service(CfmServlet.java:200)

        at coldfusion.bootstrap.BootstrapServlet.service(BootstrapServlet.java:89)

        at jrun.servlet.FilterChain.doFilter(FilterChain.java:86)

        at coldfusion.monitor.event.MonitoringServletFilter.doFilter(MonitoringServletFilter.java:42)

        at coldfusion.bootstrap.BootstrapFilter.doFilter(BootstrapFilter.java:46)

        at jrun.servlet.FilterChain.doFilter(FilterChain.java:94)

        at jrun.servlet.FilterChain.service(FilterChain.java:101)

        at jrun.servlet.ServletInvoker.invoke(ServletInvoker.java:106)

        at jrun.servlet.JRunInvokerChain.invokeNext(JRunInvokerChain.java:42)

        at jrun.servlet.JRunRequestDispatcher.invoke(JRunRequestDispatcher.java:286)

        at jrun.servlet.ServletEngineService.dispatch(ServletEngineService.java:543)

        at jrun.servlet.jrpp.JRunProxyService.invokeRunnable(JRunProxyService.java:203)

        at jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$DownstreamMetrics.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:320)

        at jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$ThreadThrottle.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:428)

        at jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$UpstreamMetrics.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:266)

        at jrunx.scheduler.WorkerThread.run(WorkerThread.java:66)

05/03 12:17:29 error (JRun Service: ProxyService [jrun.servlet.jrpp.JRunProxyService@500b675]) JRunPRoxyServer.invokeRunnable:

java.lang.IllegalStateException

        at jrun.servlet.JRunResponse.getWriter(JRunResponse.java:205)

        at jrun.servlet.JRunResponse.sendError(JRunResponse.java:597)

        at jrun.servlet.JRunRequestDispatcher.invoke(JRunRequestDispatcher.java:328)

        at jrun.servlet.ServletEngineService.dispatch(ServletEngineService.java:543)

        at jrun.servlet.jrpp.JRunProxyService.invokeRunnable(JRunProxyService.java:203)

        at jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$DownstreamMetrics.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:320)

        at jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$ThreadThrottle.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:428)

        at jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$UpstreamMetrics.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:266)

        at jrunx.scheduler.WorkerThread.run(WorkerThread.java:66)

java.lang.IllegalStateException

        at jrun.servlet.JRunResponse.getWriter(JRunResponse.java:205)

        at jrun.servlet.JRunResponse.sendError(JRunResponse.java:597)

        at jrun.servlet.JRunRequestDispatcher.invoke(JRunRequestDispatcher.java:328)

        at jrun.servlet.ServletEngineService.dispatch(ServletEngineService.java:543)

        at jrun.servlet.jrpp.JRunProxyService.invokeRunnable(JRunProxyService.java:203)

        at jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$DownstreamMetrics.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:320)

        at jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$ThreadThrottle.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:428)

        at jrunx.scheduler.ThreadPool$UpstreamMetrics.invokeRunnable(ThreadPool.java:266)

        at jrunx.scheduler.WorkerThread.run(WorkerThread.java:66)

I don't really know what to do from here.

If the page is refreshed then it loads without error. I don't know how to replicate the error, it doesn't seem to happen on any particular page or at any articular time.

I've tried setting:

     Maximum number of simultaneous Template requests: 100

in the Coldfusion administrator, I've done that based on Steven Erat's post: http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2005/3/11/ContextSwitchingBad

But I'm still getting errors. Would increasing this to a higher value help?

And then there's the "premature form ending" part of the longer Java error, I'm not sure if that's related and don't understand what it means anyway.

I've also looked through my access logs, and ruling out any images or js files that get called at the time of any errors, I've got a variety of CFM pages that return a 503 http status, and some of them are CFM pages that get returned with a content type of Javascript, and are never requested after a form post.

So in summary, I'm getting some pretty blunt error messages, and I can reproduce them at present, and the page loads fine if I just hit F5, and I'd like to know if anyone can help me to understand the source of the problem.

Oh and one last thing, we're running a RHEL 5 server with CF9, and we've upgraded recently from CF7. Before the upgrade this error was not happening.

[Dan_Bracuk]

It's possible that you have a slow page somewhere that is getting frequently accessed.  It's also possible that the frequent attempts to access the page are all by the same user who continually selects the link or button because they did not look at their status bar.

[Comcar Tech]

Thanks for your reply, sorry for the slow response.

I've looked at our logs and it's not the same page coinciding with the error, it seems to be any page can throw the error