Tomcat dies suddenly

Question

Trying to diagnose some bizarre Tomcat (7.0.21) and/or JVM errors on a 64-bit linux (CentOS) machine.

I\'m load testing our server application and tried

Answer 1

Another possibility is that the OS is running out of memory and the OOM Killer is killing your process. In this case, the JVM wouldn't get an opportunity to write a heap dump, or an hs_err_pid file.

Answer 2

If the JVM crashes, you should have a hs_err_pidNNN.log file; you don't have to do anything to enable this. Its location depends on your OS and how you are running Tomcat. On Windows, they can show up on your desktop, unless you are running as a service. Otherwise, they should be in the current working directory of the crashed process.

Your operating system probably provides additional tools for process monitoring; you could describe your environment more, or perhaps ask at serverfault.com.

It's also possible that jvisualvm is actually causing the crash.

I'd try reproducing the problem, and progressively simplify the scenario to help isolate the cause.

Answer 3

You can use the option java -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError to create a heap dump for jvm crash due to out of memory error.

More details here Using HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError parameter for heap dump for JBoss.

Answer 4

Sorry I had to remove the green check from @erickson. I finally figured out what was killing Tomcat.

It looks like a profiler plugin is not configured correctly with VisualVM and attempting to run a profile on the Tomcat process killed it.

Investigating why right now, and will update this answer once I know more.