How do I investigate the cause of a JVM crash?

Question

One day ago, after a few months of normal working, our java app starts to crash occasionally with the following error:

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# A fatal error has been detected by         


        

Answer 1

The two times I've witnessed recurring JVM crashes were both due to hardware failure, namely RAM. Running a memtest utility is the first thing I'd try.

Answer 2

I can see from the error report that you have the YourKit agent loaded. Its telemetry thread is mentioned as the requester for the operation that appears to fail. Try running the application without the YJP agent to see if you can still reproduce the crash.

Generally, JVM crashes are pretty hard to diagnose. They could happen due to a bug in some JNI code or in the JRE itself. If you suspect the latter, it may be worth submitting a bug report to Oracle.

Either way, I'd recommend to upgrade to the latest release of Java 6 to make sure it's not a known issue that's already been fixed. At the time of this writing the current release is Java 6 update 29.

Answer 3

The crash is in the JVM, not in external native code. However, the operation it crashed on has been initiated by and external DLL.

This line in the hs_err_pid file explains the operation that crashed:

VM_Operation (0x00007f5e16e35450): GetAllStackTraces, mode: safepoint, requested by thread 0x0000000040796000

Now, thread 0x0000000040796000 is

0x0000000040796000 JavaThread "YJPAgent-Telemetry" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=2115, stack(0x00007f5e16d36000,0x00007f5e16e37000)]

which is a thread created by Yourkit. "GetAllStackTraces" is something that a profiler needs to call in order to do sampling. If you remove the profiler, the crash will not happen.

With this information It's not possible to say what causes the crash, but you can try the following: Remove all -XX VM parameters, -verbose:gc and the debugging VM parameters. They might interfere with the profiling interface of the JVM.

Update

Code that calls java.lang.Thread#getAllStackTraces() or java.lang.Thread#getStackTrace() may trigger the same crash

Answer 4

Switching to another version of linux-kernel "fixes" the JVM crush problem (http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/6998-Best-strategy-to-handle-strange-JVM-errors-inside-VPS?p=40286#post40286). It helped me with my real server. There was Ubuntu server 10.04 LTS OS on it with kernel 2.6.32-33 version. So kernel update resolved this issue. JVM has no crash anymore.

Answer 5

If you're not messing with anything that would cause this directly (which basically means using native code or libraries that call native code) then it's almost always down to a bug in the JVM or hardware issue.

If it's been running fine for ages and has now started to crash then it seems to me like the hardware issue is the most likely of the two. Can you run it on another machine to rule out the issue? Of course, it definitely wouldn't hurt to upgrade to the latest Java update as well.