Tomcat 6 freezes at startup

Question

When I start tomcat 6 it freezes in certain point of the startup and stays there forever (I've waited 3 hours and nothing happened - not even an out of memory error). I don't have any clue of what could cause a behavior like that.

I'm runnig tomcat with Jira and Confluence, and the problem seem to be when tomcat tries to load confluence:

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JIRA 3.13.3 build: 344 (Enterprise Edition) started. You can now access JIRA through your web browser.
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    2009-06-02 19:38:21,272 JiraQuartzScheduler_Worker-1 INFO [jira.action.admin.DataExport] Export took 387ms
    2009-06-02 19:38:21,291 JiraQuartzScheduler_Worker-1 INFO [jira.action.admin.DataExport] Wrote 392 entities to export
    2009-06-02 19:38:21,606 INFO [main] [com.atlassian.confluence.lifecycle] contextInitialized Starting Confluence 2.10.3 (build #1519)
    2009-06-02 19:38:21,711 INFO [main] [beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader] loadBeanDefinitions Loading XML bean definitions from class path resource [bootstrapContext.xml]
    2009-06-02 19:38:22,236 INFO [main] [beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader] loadBeanDefinitions Loading XML bean definitions from class path resource [setupContext.xml]

After this line above nothing more happens.

I thought it could be a problem with permGem or something like that, so to avoid permGem limitations, I configured catalina.sh with:

CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dorg.apache.jasper.runtime.BodyContentImpl.LIMIT_BUFFER=true"

JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -server -Xms1536m -Xmx1536m -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=640m -XX:+DisableExplicitGC"

I incresed a lot jvm's space to see if it works, but it didn't help.

Tomcat version: 6.0.18 Jira version: 3.13.3 Confluence Version: 2.10.3

So, anyone have already had this problem before? Could it be a memory(RAM) problem? A problem with Spring and Tomcat6? Or any other kind of problem?

Answer 1

Do you have any errors in your log?

Have you checked if confluence is maybe waiting for the database or network?

Answer 2

Get a thread dump for the application and check for threads which are BLOCKED, WAITING or TIMED_WAITING.

Also beware of threads in RUNNABLE but doing network I/O, e.g InputStream.read().

Answer 3

I checked my database, it was not working at all, but that was not the problem that was making my tomcat freeze.

I had a lack of RAM issue. In that place where tomcat got stuck there was a memory peak to load a lot of stuff from confluence.

I am using a virtual machine(VMware) to run my confluence, jira and svn inside a server with 3 other virtual machines.

To solve the problem I had to increase the memory(RAM) my virtual machine could use, from 2Gb to 4Gb.