Skip to Content

Railo and the Microsoft SQL Server Native Driver

Last week I was working on a web crawler to crawl 250,000 URLs each night.  We had 5 client crawlers running and connecting to a master MSSQL 2013 database.  FusionGronker in ##coldfusion on freenode recommended that I try FusionReactor (a tool that allows you to monitor EVERYTHING that’s going on in your Java (ColdFusion) servers in real time.

After many hours of debugging, I noticed every hour or so, a thread was getting stuck in a Native Method call.  There was no way to kill the thread, since it was never coming back to Java for me to be able to communicate with.  I used the stack trace tool that comes with FusionReactor and after several hours of crawling, I noticed that there would be more and more of these threads that were stuck in a [Native Method].   It looked something like this: java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead0(SocketInputStream.java:???)[Native Method].  Several lines below that one, there would be a com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.sqlserverdriver trace.  After 10+ of these threads got stuck, the server would just crash and burn.  I knew that I was creating a lot of SQL Connections, but it’s nothing that I haven’t done before.

I realized that Railo also had the ability to create a new MSSQL Datasource but instead of the Microsoft driver, I used the jTDS, an open source JDBC driver.  This worked great!  I don’t know what my next step would have been had this driver not worked.
Our crawler successfully crawls 250,000 URLs in under 5 hours, all on Railo!  I used FW/1 for the crawler administration tool.

Get in touch so we can start your
next web project!

Let us know what you’re looking for. We strive to respond in 48 hours, but, every now and then, life gets in the way, so be patient if there’s a delay.



    Back to top