IIS Timeout on JBoss Transaction

Working more with our setup we started encountering “502 – Bad Gateways” errors when allowing users to run expensive queries on our database and give them the option to export the results. A temporary solution was to increase the ARR timeout as described in this blog post; the server farm settings are relevant for this case.

However, this still leaves us with the problem of some browser timing out on lengthy requests, so that we are now looking into an AJAX solution for decoupling the JBoss transaction from the front-end.

JBoss and IIS 7

I have spent some quality time today with moving a web application from a temporary development environment (Windows 2003 x86, IIS 6) to a production server (Windows 2008 R2 x64, IIS 7). The IIS-JBoss integration on the development servers has been set up based on mod_jk and worked without causing and troubles. However, reproducing the setup in the new environment was failing miserably. The first impression I am getting from IIS is that even logging is a science for itself, so it was even hard to determine why.

Luckily a forum post finally pointed me in the direction of Application Request Routing (ARR) module for IIS 7 as an alternative solution. Performance might be still a subject to be determined, but the installation and configuration is worlds cleaner compared to the mod_jk version.