Error downloading large files with Grails 1.3.7 using java.net.UrlConnection and outputstream

Question

We are running a Grails 1.3.7 application on Tomcat 1.6 environment. A few days back some of our Pdf reports started giving us issues. The smaller reports, sized around 1MB or less, work but the bigger ones give us a 'java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe' exception.

For generating Pdf reports we use itext-2.1.0. We then use the java.net.URLConnection to enable a user to download the generated file. The code follows:

// retrives file generated using itext
   def thisUrl = new File(session.getServletContext().getRealPath("/reports  /${pdffilename}")).toURI().toURL();

   def connection = null
   def pdfInputStream = null  

   try {
      connection = thisUrl.openConnection() //returns a java.net.UrlConnection
      pdfInputStream = connection.inputStream

          if (connection && pdfInputStream) {
                    connection.connectTimeout = 25* 60*1000;
                    connection.readTimeout = 25* 60*1000
                    response.setHeader "Content-disposition", "attachment; filename = ${pdffilename}"
                    response.contentType = 'pdf/pdf'
                    response.outputStream << pdfInputStream     // This line fails for large files
          } else {
                    redirect(action: 'failHandler')
         }
  } catch (e) {
         log.info('Could not report, connection may have terminated')
         throw e;
  } finally {
     response.outputStream.flush()
      response.outputStream.close()
  }

The 'response.outputStream << pdfInputStream' fails for larger file sizes giving us the following exception:

outputstream exception

Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

Check if you have a Load Balancer in you server. That could be causing your connections to time out