Description Susan McCourt 2013-02-14 14:31:29 EST

I ran into this problem in bug 400482 comment 2.
For reasons still not quite understood, trying to connect to one of my project's drive was hanging.  And we observed that when this happens, no one else on orion.eclipse.org could access the navigator root.

John explains that drive creation (what is called "connect" in the UI) uses the workspace servlet.  And the servlet methods are synchronized to prevent threading problems storing state.  Adding an ftp drive will make a socket request, and the timeout is OS dependent.  If this happens, than any other request to the workspace servlet is blocked until the timeout is done.

This exactly maps to the symptoms in the other bug.  We found that we could access subfolders via the navigator, but not the workspace root.  The subfolders requests run in a different servlet (file servlet)