Weblogic is slow to start (11mins) under VM (VirtualBox and VMware)

Question

(SOLVED! BY FAKING SYSTEM RANDOM GENERATOR, SEE BELOW)

I\'m setting up a VM image for my dev/build team. Inside that VM a Weblogic domain should be runn

Answer 1

Oracle has since created a Metalink note related to this The FMW Configuration Wizard Is Very Slow On Linux Virtual Environments. The Startup Of WLS Servers Is Also Very Slow. [ID 1344974.1]

...

Solution 1 1) Download and install the following rpm: rng-utils-2.0-1.14.1.fc6.x86_64.rpm . Contact your vendor for download details. 2) Startup the random generator as follows: rngd -r /dev/urandom -o /dev/random -t 1

By default there seems to be a dependency on /dev/random on Linux which blocks until enough randomness is generated. Virtual servers with no mouse and keyboard attached can block significantly. In the command above input is taken from the unblocking /dev/urandom so the wait for randomness does not become an application bottleneck.

Answer 2

SOLVED

Weblogic uses SecureRandom to init security subsystem. SecureRandom by default uses /dev/urandom device. For some reason, reading this device under VM comes to halt quite often. Generating console events helps to create more randomness, and release the WLS.

For the test purposes I have changed jre/lib/security/java.security file:

securerandom.source=file:/tmp/big.random.file

Weblogic now starts in 15 seconds.

Since we do not test any security stuff in our VMs, the repeating seed is totally alright for us.

Answer 3

In case you have enterprise standard app servers without privileges to change your binaries you can add a JVM flag to overwrite wich random generator should be used. E.g.:

-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom

That way you don't have to change any system settings.

Answer 4

Try install rngd. On modern systems with a hardware RNG, this will create enough entropy.