senior walk

In the SP8 tomcat bb-access logs, I’m seeing references to TP-Processor##:

 

130.184.5.7 – TP-Processor37 _42640_1 [11/Mar/2012:18:49:38 -0500] “GET /webapps/blackboard/content/listContentEditable.jsp?content_id=_603224_1&course_id=_24001_1&content_id=_603224_1 HTTP/1.1” 200 134760 “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2” 9C4A749555FA6D12515377939A7129BF 1.862 1862 134760

130.184.5.7 – TP-Processor40 _3294_1 [01/Mar/2012:11:18:34 -0600] “POST /webapps/blackboard/dwr_open/call/plaincall/Multiple.5.dwr HTTP/1.1” 200 311 “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.56 Safari/535.11” D39CC6EAAF0B45749E91901F7FBC755C 0.008 8 311

130.184.5.7 – TP-Processor42 _3294_1 [01/Mar/2012:11:18:19 -0600] “GET /images/ci/ng/cm_arrow_right.gif HTTP/1.1” 200 410 “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.56 Safari/535.11” D39CC6EAAF0B45749E91901F7FBC755C 0.013 13 410

99.3.47.43 – TP-Processor49 _6_1 [10/Feb/2012:15:26:16 -0600] “GET / HTTP/1.1” 302 – “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.11 Safari/535.19” 939BB6E1CA0D806181783070DB0A552F 0.516 516 –

99.3.47.43 – TP-Processor47 _6_1 [10/Feb/2012:15:26:20 -0600] “GET /webapps/login/ HTTP/1.1” 302 – “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.11 Safari/535.19” 939BB6E1CA0D806181783070DB0A552F 0.228 228 –

 

and occasionally some lines do not list it:

99.3.47.43 – – – [10/Feb/2012:15:26:19 -0600] “GET /webapps/login HTTP/1.1” 302 – “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.11 Safari/535.19” 939BB6E1CA0D806181783070DB0A552F 0.000 0 –

 

So, what is the TP-Processor?

Blackboard Answer:  The Performance Troubleshooting Guide states the following:

“Tomcat request processing threads are labelled “TP-Processorxx” where xx is the thread number.”

http://kb.blackboard.com/display/KB/Performance+Troubleshooting+Guide

To see this in the Performance Troubleshooting Guide navigate to the following:

  1. Click on the Analyze Tab
  2. Scroll down to the “Tomcat Application Server” section
  3. Scroll down to “Unresponsive to requests” area

If the application server is completely unresponsive to requests and is not accompanied by high cpu and heap utilisation, an application related condition is likely causing the problem. Thread dumps will indicate what each thread in the JVM is currently doing at the time that the thread dump is taken. Ideally, several thread dumps should be taken over the period so they can be analyzed for the period, rather than a single point in time.

Tomcat request processing threads are labelled “TP-Processorxx” where xx is the thread number. If Tomcat is unresponsive, the stacktraces for these threads will indicate the condition these threads are waiting on.

 

There have been some modifications to the access logging for better ease of troubleshooting, however this is an undocumented enhancement.  Including the TP-Processor### helps with investigating which thread a line item is tied to should we have a matching threaddump for an issue. It would not list the TP-Processor if the item was not matched to a particular thread.

]]>