Tomcat shuts down automatically

Question

I'm using Apache and Tomcat on a Windows server and since this morning, Tomcat stops working without any logs. It doesn't hang, it just shut down.
There's no log in Tomcat, the CPU/Memory are fines, there are no System.Exit in my code.

Anybody ever had this problem?

It happens at random, after 5-10 minutes. The application responds normally and sometime, boom.. stops working.

UPDATE : Still no clue. The Admin team will install the webapp on another box...

Answer 1

things to look for in debugging an issue like this:

• Look at the logs directory ($TOMCAT_ROOT/logs) to make sure none of the log files have any stack traces
• Look at the tomcat startup script to make check the location of the log files to see if the logs are not being written to another directory.
• Another reason could be some other user/process could be issuing a kill -9 that could kill tomcat without giving it any chance to log errors.

Answer 2

Hi supersheep. This sounds like the JVM is crashing. Have you looked for a JVM crash log? It typically has a name like hs_err_pid*.log and is created in the JVM's working directory.

If you find a file like this and upload it, then we can probably help more.

Some questions:

• Have you recently changed the version of Java you are using?
• What is the exact version of Tomcat you are using?
• Are you using Tomcat Native (the Apache Portable Runtime)?

Answer 3

another possibility is that some process was started this morning on the box that is binding to a port that your server requires.

Answer 4

Are your servlets or one of it's dependencies allowed to call System.exit()? (Not sure how locked down Tomcat VMs are in that sense)

I've had developers thinking it's ok to use exit(666); on detecting a non-invertable matrix (which isn't good, but sure as heck not fatal). Arrgh. Perhaps you have some similar culprit in your system?

Answer 5

1. Does Tomcat have enough memory (if it's possible, shows your memory and other JVM parameters - CATALINA_OPTS)?
2. Can JVM allocate all necessary memory, providing for tomcat in CATALINA_OPTS?
3. Do you have special classloaders?

Answer 6

It was probably an Apache issue. We rebooted, palyed a little with Apache config and it worked again after that... Weird