"to get around the problem I configured a JIRA standalone to use the same database and did the inport from there. Starting JIRA in Jetty afterwards worked perfectly"

Summary

The problem was caused by a code change in the ofbiz code (a setOverriceAutoCommit()) believed to provide a performance enhancement when performing large imports. Initially we attempted to fix the problem by making the additional code changes below. Rather than just assuming that the JDBC connection was in auto-commit mode, we explicitly checked and set the connection to auto-commit. This fixed the import problems on Jetty.

As part of the performance tests we tested 3 different scenarios:

1. A normal import (w/o the fix below)
2. An import where the setOverrideAutoCommit was commented out (w/o the fix below)
3. A normal import (with the fix below)

The performance tests showed that the original change in the ofbiz code which was believed to improve the performance did in fact only show improvements in one case (Tomcat with local Postgres database). In all other tests (Tomcat with remote Postgres databse, Resin with both remote and local Postgres database) performance was in fact better when running scenario 2 (where setOverrideAutoCommit() was commented out).

As a result we therefore decided to rollback the original change (i.e.: commented out setOverrideAutoCommit) and not deploy the code changes below. With this solution, Jetty imports are working again, and large imports should show slight (10-15%) performance improvements.

Code changes

We added the following code in

//allow a single thread to override the autocommit status
        if (Boolean.TRUE.equals(overrideAutoCommit.get()))
        {
            _manualTX = false;
            try
            {
                if (!_connection.getAutoCommit())
                {
                    try
                    {
                        // attempt to set autoCommit to true
                        _connection.setAutoCommit(true);
                    } catch (SQLException e)
                    {
                        // if setting auto-commit failed, then a commit will happen at the end of the transaction.
                        _manualTX = true;
                        Debug.logWarning(e, "Failed to enable autocommit on connection. Manual transactions enabled.");
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (SQLException e)
            {
                throw new GenericDataSourceException("Failed to read auto-commit status of the connection", e);
            }
        }

Performance

Three different tests were performed with data from support.atlassian.com:

1. A normal import (without the fix above)
2. An import where the setOverrideAutoCommit was commented out (without the fix above)
3. A normal import (with the fix above)

Results

Results are: <TIME FOR IMPORT> mins + <TIME FOR INDEXING> mins