Tomcat stopped without any log or any stack

Question

We have trouble with Tomcat 5.5 which stops at night on our production servers (Linux CentOS 4.8) and we have no idea why it stops... There is no Tomcat\'s log in catalina.out o

Answer 1

This worked for me.

As suggested here in other answers checked system logs in /var/log/messages but permission denied for me. So, I used dmesg command instead and got this in the logs

"Out of memory: Kill process 14606 (java) score 106 or sacrifice child".

In the output I also noticed Swap Memory free 0 K. Ran top command to confirm the same. So, somehow there was a high memory usage which caused the OS to kill my tomcat process.

After spending hours finally got the reason.

ps -ef | grep tomcat showed that there were several tomcat processes running for the same application. It seems that, earlier tomcat shutdowns might not have been completed successfully and due to some reason the processes were not killed even after the shutdown, which was causing the high memory usage.

So, killed all running tomcat processes using kill. SWAP memory got freed.

Started tomcat again, worked fine. :)