Characterizing configuration problems in Java EE application servers: An empirical study with GlassFish and JBoss

Abstract

We present a characterization study on configuration problems for Java EE application servers. Our study analyzes a total of 281 bug-reports in two phases: a longer (Study-1) and a shorter (Study-2) phase, from bug tracking systems of two popular open source servers, GassFish and JBoss. We study configuration problems in four orthogonal dimensions: problem-type, problem-time, problem-manifestation and problem-culprit. A configuration problem, by type, is classified as a paramater, compatibility or a missing-component problem. Problem-time is classified as pre-boot-time, boot-time or run-time. A configuration problem manifestation is either silent or non-silent. Problem-culprit is either the user or the developer of the application server. Our analysis shows that more than one-third of all problems in each server are configuration problems. Among all configuration problems for each server in study-1 at-least 50% of problems are paramater-based and occur at run-time. In study-2, which focuses on specific versions over a shorter time-period, all three problem types parameter, compatibility and missing-component have an almost equal share. Further, on average 89% of configuration problems result in a non-silent manifestation, while 91% of them are due to mistakes by the developer and require code-modification to fix the problem. Finally, we test the robustness to configuration by injecting configuration-bugs at boot-time with SPECjEnterprise2010 application deployed in each server. JBoss performs better than GlassFish with all of the injections giving a non-silent manifestation as opposed to only 65% non-silent manifestations in GlassFish.