Perl v. Java... NOT
Anthony Eden's FreeRoller site had some Roller problems today and CWinters caught it as a screenshot. Man, I hate that! I noticed it too. I'm hoping that this was caused by a simple DBCP database connection pooling configuration problem. The Roller Installation Guide suggests a DBCP maxWait of 100 milliseconds which is way too low. The maxWait should probably be set to 20000 or 30000 milliseconds on a big site like Anthony's.
The problem may have been amplified by the Roller page caching mechanism. You see, Roller uses OSCache to cache weblog pages. If an error occurs, a page full of error messages might find it's way into the cache and not get cleared out until either the weblog's author makes a change or the cache entry times out. Maybe Roller should invalidate the cache when an error occurs? Hmmm...