Broken pipe exception when one application tries to connect to another

Question

We have a setup in which one application (coordinator) delegates task to another applications (worker) and they finish the task and push back the results over socket.

It works fine but on one machine we are getting broken pipe error for most of the workers. Everything is on the same machine and we have checked firewall settings as well and they look fine.

I was just wondering that if replacing the machine Name OR IP with loopbackaddress would help as loopbackaddress does not have any hardware associated?

Please share your views on it OR if you have any other suggestion.

Exception trace -

javax.servlet.ServletException: Error building response envelope: ClientAbortException:  java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe
at org.apache.soap.server.http.RPCRouterServlet.doPost(RPCRouterServlet.java:418)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:637)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:290)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:206)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:233)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:191)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:127)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:102)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:109)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:298)
at org.apache.jk.server.JkCoyoteHandler.invoke(JkCoyoteHandler.java:190)
at org.apache.jk.common.HandlerRequest.invoke(HandlerRequest.java:291)
at org.apache.jk.common.ChannelSocket.invoke(ChannelSocket.java:774)
at org.apache.jk.common.ChannelSocket.processConnection(ChannelSocket.java:703)
at org.apache.jk.common.ChannelSocket$SocketConnection.runIt(ChannelSocket.java:896)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:690)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)

Appriciate your help

Thanks

Answer 1

If you received broken pipe exception it is because a connection was established and the other side suddenly closed the connection and you are trying to send data through the channel. At TCP level, the other side already sent a RST message. After that the application is trying to send data through that socket/channel. Trying to stem information from your logs, I suppose the servlet is communicating with the worker through RPC and the worker somehow closed the connection.