Allow the embedded web server to be shut down gracefully

[LutzStrobel]

We are using spring-boot and spring-cloud to realize a micro service archtecture. During load tests we are facing lots of errors such as "entitymanager closed and others" if we shut the micro service down during load.
We are wondering if there is an option to configure the embedded container to shut its service connector down and waits for an empty request queue before shutting down the complete application context.

If there is no such option, I did not find any, then it would be great to extend the shutdownhook of spring to respect such requirements.

[wilkinsona]

We currently stop the application context and then stop the container. We did try to reverse this ordering but it had some unwanted side effects so we're stuck with it for now at least. That's the bad news.

The good news is that you can actually get a graceful shutdown yourself if you're happy to get your hands a bit dirty. The gist is that you need to pause Tomcat's connector and then wait for its thread pool to shutdown before allowing the destruction of the application context to proceed. It looks something like this:

package com.example;

import java.util.concurrent.Executor;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

import org.apache.catalina.connector.Connector;
import org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPoolExecutor;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.ConfigurableEmbeddedServletContainer;
import org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedServletContainerCustomizer;
import org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.tomcat.TomcatConnectorCustomizer;
import org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.tomcat.TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationListener;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.event.ContextClosedEvent;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@SpringBootApplication
@RestController
public class Gh4657Application {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Gh4657Application.class, args);
    }

    @RequestMapping("/pause")
    public String pause() throws InterruptedException {
        Thread.sleep(10000);
        return "Pause complete";
    }

    @Bean
    public GracefulShutdown gracefulShutdown() {
        return new GracefulShutdown();
    }

    @Bean
    public EmbeddedServletContainerCustomizer tomcatCustomizer() {
        return new EmbeddedServletContainerCustomizer() {

            @Override
            public void customize(ConfigurableEmbeddedServletContainer container) {
                if (container instanceof TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory) {
                    ((TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory) container)
                            .addConnectorCustomizers(gracefulShutdown());
                }

            }
        };
    }

    private static class GracefulShutdown implements TomcatConnectorCustomizer,
            ApplicationListener<ContextClosedEvent> {

        private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(GracefulShutdown.class);

        private volatile Connector connector;

        @Override
        public void customize(Connector connector) {
            this.connector = connector;
        }

        @Override
        public void onApplicationEvent(ContextClosedEvent event) {
            this.connector.pause();
            Executor executor = this.connector.getProtocolHandler().getExecutor();
            if (executor instanceof ThreadPoolExecutor) {
                try {
                    ThreadPoolExecutor threadPoolExecutor = (ThreadPoolExecutor) executor;
                    threadPoolExecutor.shutdown();
                    if (!threadPoolExecutor.awaitTermination(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS)) {
                        log.warn("Tomcat thread pool did not shut down gracefully within "
                                + "30 seconds. Proceeding with forceful shutdown");
                    }
                }
                catch (InterruptedException ex) {
                    Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
                }
            }
        }

    }

}

I think it makes sense to provide behaviour like this out of the box, or at least an option to enable it. However, that'll require a bit more work as it'll need to work with all of the embedded containers that we support (Jetty, Tomcat, and Undertow), cope with multiple connectors (HTTP and HTTPS, for example) and we'll need to think about the configuration options, if any, that we'd want to offer: switching it on or off, configuring the period that we wait for the thread pool to shutdown, etc.

[LutzStrobel]

Thank you for your advice.
We currently simply shut down the embedded container and the waiting a short time before closing the application context.

What do you thing, will it be possible in future to shut down a spring boot application more gracefully?

[wilkinsona]

What do you thing, will it be possible in future to shut down a spring boot application more gracefully?

Yes. As I said above "I think it makes sense to provide behaviour like this out of the box, or at least an option to enable it".

I'm going to re-open this issue as we'll use it to track the possible enhancement.

[tkvangorder]

+1 on this request. We ran into a similar problem when load testing and dropping a node from the test. @wilkinsona in your example, I was thinking of using an implementation of smartlifecylce so I can insure the connector is shutdown first. You said you ran into issues shutting down tomcat first?

[bohrqiu]

I think the right order is:

1. pause the io endpoint

   web container just pasue(deny new request come in),and RPC framework need notify client don't send new request and wait current request be proccessed

2. wait the request to be processed and response client

3. close the io endpoint

4. close spring service

5. close log system

so we do it as follows:

    @Override
    public void finished(ConfigurableApplicationContext context, Throwable exception) {
        if (exception == null) {
            //install UncaughtExceptionHandler
            UncaughtExceptionHandlerWrapper.install();
            //when system startup ,register shutdown hooks to clean resouces.
            Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook(new Thread() {
                @Override
                public void run() {
                    //run all shutdown hooks before spring container avoid service dependency
                    ShutdownHooks.shutdownAll();
                    //close spring container
                    context.close();
                    shutdownLogSystem();
                }
            });
            //log startup info
            LoggerFactory.getLogger(YijiApplicationRunListener.class).info("启动成功: http://127.0.0.1:{}",
            context.getEnvironment().getProperty(Apps.HTTP_PORT));
        } else {
            ShutdownHooks.shutdownAll();
            shutdownLogSystem();
        }
    }

[tkvangorder]

This issue is actually a bit more complicated.

I know that SmartLifeCycle can be used to set the order in which beans are notified of life cycle events. However, there is no generalized way for a service to know it should startup/shutdown before another service.

Consider the following:

A sprint boot application is running an embedded servlet container and is also producing/consuming JMS messages.

On the close event, the servlet container really needs to pause the connector first, process its remain working (any connections that have already been establish.)

We need to insure this is the FIRST thing that happens, prior to the JMS infrastructure shutting down because the work done inside tomcat may rely on JMS.

The JMS infrastructure has a similar requirement: it must stop listening for messages and chew through any remaining messages it has already accepted.

I can certainly implement a SmartLifeCycle class that sets the phase "very high"....and I could even create two instances, one for embedded servlet container and one for JMS and insure the correct order.

But in the spirit of Spring Boot, if I add a tomcat container, its my expectation that when the application shuts down, it will gracefully stop accepting connections, process remaining work, and exit.

It would be helpful if there was a mechanism to allow ordering to be expressed relative to other services "JMS must start before tomcat", "tomcat must close before JMS". This would be similar to the AutoConfigureBefore/AutoConfigureAfter annotations that are used in Spring boot.

One way to approach this might be to create an enum for the generalized services (This is not ideal, but I can't think of another way without introducing artificial, compile time dependencies.):

EMBEDDED_CONTAINER
JMS
DISCOVERY_CLIENT
.
.
The annotations could leverage the enums to order the life cycle listeners.

For now, its up to the developer to explicitly define the shutdown order of services via "SmartLifeCycle" instances...which can get a bit messy and seems like extra work for something that should really work out of the box.

[wilkinsona]

@tkvangorder You don't need to use SmartLifecycleto gracefully shut down Tomcat as shown in my comment above. It happens in response to a ContextClosedEvent which is fired at the very beginning of the context's close processing before any of the beans in the context are processed.

Beyond this, Spring Framework already has support for closing things down in the correct order. For example you can implement DisposableBean. When the container disposes of a bean, it will dispose of anything that depends on it first.