Tag: SMTP

Fixing Performance Problems on Your JBoss Web Apps By Diagnosing Blocked Thread Issues

I was once per­plexed by a bizarre per­for­mance issue, I encoun­tered at seem­ing­ly ran­dom inter­vals, in an appli­ca­tion I help to main­tain. The appli­ca­tion kept freez­ing up, with­out any log mes­sages to use for diag­no­sis. This was very frus­trat­ing, because it meant the appli­ca­tion server typ­i­cal­ly had to be restart­ed man­u­al­ly to restore ser­vice.

After a bit of research, I learned of thread block­ing, as a poten­tial per­for­mance issue. Being as I was fair­ly cer­tain that the data­base was func­tion­ing with­in accept­able para­me­ters and the server had ample CPU and mem­o­ry to han­dle the load. I sought to deter­mine if thread block­ing was an issue.

I start­ed by sim­ply run­ning a twid­dle com­mand to dump the threads, when­ev­er this per­for­mance prob­lem was report­ed. This showed that the BLOCKED threads were indeed the cause. Con­tin­ue read­ing “Fix­ing Per­for­mance Prob­lems on Your JBoss Web Apps By Diag­nos­ing Blocked Thread Issues”

Sending Mail in Shell Scripts via an External Server with Nail

If you’ve ever tried send­ing email via the com­mand line, using the mail util­i­ty, you may find that the method can be unre­li­able in some cas­es.  The email mes­sages are often inter­cept­ed by spam bots, fil­tered by secu­ri­ty pro­grams, etc.  A more ele­gant and sta­ble alter­na­tive, is to use your exist­ing email server to send the mes­sage.  Using the pro­gram nail makes this an easy task to do via the com­mand line.

The fol­low­ing exam­ple shows you how to send a sim­ple mes­sage with attach­ment. Here is the syn­tax for send­ing a mes­sage with nail.

echo "" | nail -s "" -a   ...

In order for nail to func­tion, you must have the .mail con­fig­u­ra­tion file in your path. Here is a sam­ple .mail con­fig­u­ra­tion file to get you start­ed quick­ly.

set smtp=smtp://yourhost.com
set from="yourname@yourhost.com (Display Name)"
set smtp-auth=login
set smtp-auth-user=your_username
set smtp-auth-password=your_password