soap - JAX-WS SoapHandler with large messages: OutOfMemoryError

Question

Using JAX-WS 2, I see an issue that others have spoken about as well. The issue is that if a SOAP message is received inside a handler, and that SOAP message is large - whether due to inline SOAP body elements that happen to have lots of content, or due to MTOM attachments - then it is dangerously easy to get an OutOfMemoryError.

The reason is that the call to getMessage() seems to set off a chain of events that involve reading the entire SOAP message on the wire, and creating an object (or objects) representing what was on the wire.

For example:

...
public boolean handleMessage(SOAPMessageContext context)
{
    // for a large message, this will cause an OutOfMemoryError
    System.out.println( context.getMessage().countAttachments() );
...

My question is: is there a known mechanism/workaround for dealing with this? Specifically, it would be nice to access the SOAP part in a SOAP message without forcing the attachments (if MTOM for example) to also be vacuumed up.

Answer 1

For those who run their app on JBoss 6 & 7 (with Apache CXF)... I was able to troubleshoot the problem by implementing my handler from the LogicalHandler interface instead of the SOAPHandler. In this case your handleMessage() method would get the LogicalMessageContext context (instead of SOAPMessageContext) in the arguments that has no issues with the context.getMessage() call