Intermittent JBoss shutdown running Alfresco 3.0 share

[chrisb]

I am not sure if this is an alfresco issue or not, I just mention it here in case anyone else has seen something similar, and its something I need to solve quickly!

We have an Alfresco 3.0 Enterprise installation with Share setup for a document sharing application. Its a failrly standard Share setup running with a PostgreSQL backend, with Alfresco deployed inside a JBoss-AS install. The whole thing runs on a Windows 2003 Server box. The site currently has less than 5 concurrent users, and is not under any heavy loading.

The issue we are seeing is that periodically, and with no identifiable cause, the JBoss instance shuts itself down. This has happened a few times now and we are trying to work out if there might be anything initiated on the alfresco side of things that might cause this.

When this happens, in the JBoss server logs we see:

2009-04-08 11:13:45,131 INFO  [org.jboss.system.server.Server] Runtime shutdown hook called, forceHalt: true‍

A few lines further up in the log we see:

2009-04-08 11:01:22,318 INFO  [STDOUT] 11:01:22,318  WARN  [alfresco.heartbeat.HeartBeat] java.net.SocketTimeoutException: connect timed out‍

which seems to occur a few times over the previous few hours.

Is there a heartbeat mechanism in Alfresco 3.0 that would initiate a shutdown if unable to contact a licensing server or similar (seems unlikely)?

I am in the process of upping the logging levels in Alfresco to try and get more info, but in the meantime it would be good to hear any suggestions or advice from anyone that has seen anything similar.

Thanks,

Chris

[mrogers]

One thing it could be.

There have been problems with getting Tomcat based applications (including Alfresco) to shut down (see these forums and JIRA) and the more recent versions of Alfresco contain something called shutdown backstop that comes into play when alfresco is terminated.   Basically it waits for a configurable delay and then kills the JVM if alfresco is still running.

The backstop should never fire but if it is causing you a problem you can turn it off.

[chrisb]

Thanks for the info. I'll look at that next if my current approach doesn't pan out.

It looks like there are issues specific to JBoss-AS running on windows that have been collectively grouped together under the ominous title of "MysteriousShutowns" - http://www.jboss.org/community/docs/DOC-11456.

It basically looks like OS initiated shutdown messages to the JVM. I am trying  a few extra JVM parameters that are supposed to help stop this happening. WIll update this post of they work.

[chrisb]

Just a quick follow up to this.

We added the "-Xrs" JVM param to the JBoss "run.bat" and so far things seem to be holding up.

The link in my post further up this thread gives an explanation of what this param does, but essentially it seems that on some OS's the Sun JVM can respond to certain OS generated messages as shutdown commands. The -Xrs JVM param configures the JVM to ignore some of these OS messages.