DocumentBuilder hangs

[annegrl]

Hi all,

I'm not sure if this a place for java XML questions, but hopefully it is. I have an application which is using Xerces parser for XML parsing. Most of the time, I have no problems. However, occasionally, at the point I am creating the new DocumentBuilder ..
...
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf =
DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder builder = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
...
..the entire application will freeze. The exact same XML message may sometimes work fine, and sometimes cause this freeze and sometimes not(well, I guess it really unrelated to the message, since it's not at the point of parsing it yet). Sometimes when restarting the application, everything will proceed fine. Other times, it consistently freezes, across multiple restarts.

What I'm trying to figure out is if there are any tricky situations when working with Xerces/JAXP/etc that would corrupt the environment or would prevent it from cleaning up (across application restarts)? By the way, I am running this on AIX.

Thanks for any ideas you may have!
anne

 

[palbano]

Hi anne,

You post would probably be more appropriate in the Java forum: forum269

I've been using the Xerces parser in Java 1.3 and now 1.4 for several years now on Win32 platforms in multi threaded applications without ever seeing a problem.

This causes my initial suspicion to be that your problem is not related to the parser so much as the JVM for your platform. That assumes of course that the problem is not a threading issue like a dead lock or something.

I do remember reading some posts on another board (other than Tek-Tips) that involved problems with Xerces in a Solaris environment. I believe the problem was related to slow parsing of documents larger than 100k (approximate). Again this indicates a JVM problem to me.

Good luck
-pete