Glassfish, XA Transactions, and PostgreSQL

The other night I was working on the source for ActionBazaar (EJB 3.2 in Action) when I ran into a new problem. In the code that I was writing I was both submitting a message to a JMS queue and also creating a user in a database within stateless session bean. This obviously would use a two-phase commit. When I had setup the JDBC connection pool in Glassfish, I had created it as an XADataSource. Apparently my PostgreSQL setup wasn’t quite setup to handle this as I immediately got this exception:

Exception [java.lang.RuntimeException: org.postgresql.xa.PGXAException: Error preparing transaction] on Resource [prepare] operation.|#]

[#|2012-02-08T23:37:21.962-0500|WARNING|glassfish3.1.1|javax.enterprise.system.core.transaction.com.sun.jts.jtsxa|_ThreadID=22;_ThreadName=Thread-4;|JTS5068: Unexpected error occurred in rollback
org.postgresql.xa.PGXAException: Error rolling back prepared transaction
	at org.postgresql.xa.PGXAConnection.rollback(PGXAConnection.java:406)
	at com.sun.gjc.spi.XAResourceImpl.rollback(XAResourceImpl.java:195)
	at com.sun.jts.jta.TransactionState.rollback(TransactionState.java:193)
	at com.sun.jts.jtsxa.OTSResourceImpl.rollback(OTSResourceImpl.java:333)
	at com.sun.jts.CosTransactions.RegisteredResources.distributeRollback(RegisteredResources.java:1038)
	at com.sun.jts.CosTransactions.TopCoordinator.rollback(TopCoordinator.java:2290)
	at com.sun.jts.CosTransactions.CoordinatorTerm.commit(CoordinatorTerm.java:420)
	at com.sun.jts.CosTransactions.TerminatorImpl.commit(TerminatorImpl.java:250)
	at com.sun.jts.CosTransactions.CurrentImpl.commit(CurrentImpl.java:623)
	at com.sun.jts.jta.TransactionManagerImpl.commit(TransactionManagerImpl.java:323)
	at com.sun.enterprise.transaction.jts.JavaEETransactionManagerJTSDelegate.commitDistributedTransaction(JavaEETransactionManagerJTSDelegate.java:186)
	at com.sun.enterprise.transaction.JavaEETransactionManagerSimplified.commit(JavaEETransactionManagerSimplified.java:858)
	at com.sun.ejb.containers.BaseContainer.completeNewTx(BaseContainer.java:5114)
	at com.sun.ejb.containers.BaseContainer.postInvokeTx(BaseContainer.java:4879)
	at com.sun.ejb.containers.BaseContainer.postInvoke(BaseContainer.java:2039)
	at com.sun.ejb.containers.BaseContainer.postInvoke(BaseContainer.java:1990)
	at com.sun.ejb.containers.EJBLocalObjectInvocationHandler.invoke(EJBLocalObjectInvocationHandler.java:222)
	at com.sun.ejb.containers.EJBLocalObjectInvocationHandlerDelegate.invoke(EJBLocalObjectInvocationHandlerDelegate.java:88)
	at $Proxy310.createUser(Unknown Source)
	at com.actionbazaar.controller.BidderAccountController.create(BidderAccountController.java:396)
	at com.actionbazaar.controller.org$jboss$weld$bean-actionbazaar-ManagedBean-class_com$actionbazaar$controller$BidderAccountController_$$_WeldClientProxy.create(org$jboss$weld$bean-actionbazaar-ManagedBean-class_com$actionbazaar$controller$BidderAccountController_$$_WeldClientProxy.java)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
	at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
	at com.sun.el.parser.AstValue.invoke(AstValue.java:234)
	at com.sun.el.MethodExpressionImpl.invoke(MethodExpressionImpl.java:297)
	at org.jboss.weld.util.el.ForwardingMethodExpression.invoke(ForwardingMethodExpression.java:43)
	at org.jboss.weld.el.WeldMethodExpression.invoke(WeldMethodExpression.java:56)
	at com.sun.faces.facelets.el.TagMethodExpression.invoke(TagMethodExpression.java:105)
	at javax.faces.component.MethodBindingMethodExpressionAdapter.invoke(MethodBindingMethodExpressionAdapter.java:88)
	at com.sun.faces.application.ActionListenerImpl.processAction(ActionListenerImpl.java:102)
	at javax.faces.component.UICommand.broadcast(UICommand.java:315)
	at javax.faces.component.UIViewRoot.broadcastEvents(UIViewRoot.java:794)
	at javax.faces.component.UIViewRoot.processApplication(UIViewRoot.java:1259)
	at com.sun.faces.lifecycle.InvokeApplicationPhase.execute(InvokeApplicationPhase.java:81)
	at com.sun.faces.lifecycle.Phase.doPhase(Phase.java:101)
	at com.sun.faces.lifecycle.LifecycleImpl.execute(LifecycleImpl.java:118)
	at javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet.service(FacesServlet.java:593)
	at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.service(StandardWrapper.java:1539)
	at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:343)
	at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:217)
	at com.ocpsoft.pretty.PrettyFilter.doFilter(PrettyFilter.java:118)
	at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:256)
	at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:217)
	at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:279)
	at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:175)
	at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.doInvoke(StandardPipeline.java:655)
	at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java:595)
	at com.sun.enterprise.web.WebPipeline.invoke(WebPipeline.java:98)
	at com.sun.enterprise.web.PESessionLockingStandardPipeline.invoke(PESessionLockingStandardPipeline.java:91)
	at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:162)
	at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.doService(CoyoteAdapter.java:330)
	at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:231)
	at com.sun.enterprise.v3.services.impl.ContainerMapper.service(ContainerMapper.java:174)
	at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.invokeAdapter(ProcessorTask.java:828)
	at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.doProcess(ProcessorTask.java:725)
	at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.process(ProcessorTask.java:1019)
	at com.sun.grizzly.http.DefaultProtocolFilter.execute(DefaultProtocolFilter.java:225)
	at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.executeProtocolFilter(DefaultProtocolChain.java:137)
	at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:104)
	at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:90)
	at com.sun.grizzly.http.HttpProtocolChain.execute(HttpProtocolChain.java:79)
	at com.sun.grizzly.ProtocolChainContextTask.doCall(ProtocolChainContextTask.java:54)
	at com.sun.grizzly.SelectionKeyContextTask.call(SelectionKeyContextTask.java:59)
	at com.sun.grizzly.ContextTask.run(ContextTask.java:71)
	at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.doWork(AbstractThreadPool.java:532)
	at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.run(AbstractThreadPool.java:513)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:680)
Caused by: org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: prepared transaction with identifier "4871251_CwAAAMWkX2BCZWFnbGUsc2VydmVyLFAzNzAw_QmVhZ2xlLHNlcnZlcixQMzcwMCwA" does not exist
	at org.postgresql.core.v3.QueryExecutorImpl.receiveErrorResponse(QueryExecutorImpl.java:2102)
	at org.postgresql.core.v3.QueryExecutorImpl.processResults(QueryExecutorImpl.java:1835)
	at org.postgresql.core.v3.QueryExecutorImpl.execute(QueryExecutorImpl.java:257)
	at org.postgresql.jdbc2.AbstractJdbc2Statement.execute(AbstractJdbc2Statement.java:500)
	at org.postgresql.jdbc2.AbstractJdbc2Statement.executeWithFlags(AbstractJdbc2Statement.java:374)
	at org.postgresql.jdbc2.AbstractJdbc2Statement.executeUpdate(AbstractJdbc2Statement.java:302)
	at org.postgresql.xa.PGXAConnection.rollback(PGXAConnection.java:396)
	... 68 more
|#]

Digging into it, I discovered that I had to set set max_prepared_transactions and also lower the shared_buffers. The value set the value for max_prepared_transaction to 20 which is the same as max_connections. These changes were made to postgresql.conf. Changing this file of course required a restart of PostgreSQL – no restart of Glassfish was required. Obviously my database isn’t optimized and this was just a hack to get things operational. In a real production environment a little more tuning would be required.