StackOverflowError

[thomasl]

Hello,

I have just come upon the following error when running a (rather large) BPM script:

Caused by: java.lang.StackOverflowError
        at org.activiti.engine.impl.context.Context.getProcessEngineConfiguration(Context.java:56) [activiti-engine-5.14.jar:5.14]
        at org.activiti.engine.impl.history.HistoryManager.recordActivityStart(HistoryManager.java:189) [activiti-engine-5.14.jar:5.14]
        at org.activiti.engine.impl.history.handler.ActivityInstanceStartHandler.notify(ActivityInstanceStartHandler.java:30) [activiti-engine-5.14.jar:5.14]
        at org.activiti.engine.impl.pvm.runtime.AbstractEventAtomicOperation.execute(AbstractEventAtomicOperation.java:42) [activiti-engine-5.14.jar:5.14]

Do you have any idea what met be causing this error ? An issue in my script or an Activiti configuration issue (the issue seems to arise in a ThreadLocal stack read operation, this may be suspicious).

Thanks,

Tom

[thomasl]

I tried with an increased JVM stack size (-Xss) and the problem went away. However, is it just a matter of JVM tuning or a symptom that there might be an issue with my script ?
On the whole stack trace, the CommandContext.performOperation() method calls itself a large number of times. Is it a normal Activiti behavior that I need to be aware of ?

Regards,

Tom

[jbarrez]

I'm afraid you hit a long outstanding Activiti bug (indeed with performOperation). When you have a huge number of steps executed in the same transaction, you will see it (99% of users never have so many).
We have a fix for that specific issue, but it makes half of our test suite fail … and we haven't found a better solution yet… But it's something we look into from time to time cause we really are annoyed by it.

[gap]

I am also experiencing the exact same problem. Have set JVM stack size to 1M but the Exception still occurs after about 20 iterations.
What is the adequate work around, if I have to set up a multi-instance sub-process that has to iterate over a collection with about 6'000 elements?

Thanks a lot for any help.

[jbarrez]

What I said above still holds: its a fundamental issue in Activiti. But we're working on a solution for it (don't expect anything soonish, it's a major refactoring!)

Also: what is the use case for 6000 elements? Is a BPM engine the appropriate tool for this?