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One of our customers had been running into some trouble with one of  their Fisheye instances after we performed a recent upgrade. They were getting java.lang.OutOfMemoryError errors with no specific cause, such as permgen.  Initially we thought that due the size of the instance, and possibly some new features, it might just require a bigger foot print but after some investigation we tracked down that it was actually a bug in the Jetty container that comes packaged with Fisheye (see http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/FE-2477 for details).

The customer wanted us to go ahead and try upgrading the bundled container.  While this is something we hadn’t ever attempted (and probably is not a recommended practice except where warranted), we serve as the IT department for our customers Internet infrastructure and are always up for a challenge.  We started looking into what was required to make this happen.

Well it turns out that this is actually rather easy.  So easy in fact that all you have to do is replace 3 jars from the installation.

Here is the basic rundown:

Go get the new version from Codehaus at http://dist.codehaus.org/jetty/jetty-6.1.23/.  Grab these 3 jars from the package:

• lib/jetty-6.1.23.jar
• lib/jetty-util-6.1.23.jar
• lib/ext/jetty-ajp-6.1.23.jar

In the fisheye container directory under lib you will find these three jars:

• jetty-6.1.16.jar
• jetty-ajp-6.1.16.jar
• jetty-util-6.1.16.jar

Shutdown the fisheye instance and move them someplace safe. Copy the three new jars you grabbed from the jetty package and put them in place of the three jars you just moved to the safe place. Bring the instance back up and your good.

So if you find yourself getting heap errors from Fisheye that look a little like this:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
at java.util.zip.Deflater.init (Native Method)
at java.util.zip.Deflater.(Unknown Source)
at java.util.zip.Deflater.(Unknown Source)

Then it is likely you’ve been bit by this bug and you might want to consider an upgrade to your jetty container.