I can't shutdown Tomcat!

[Timothy Sam]

Hi, I'm in the process of configuring our server via SSH. We're hosted on a Linux platform. I managed to install java and tomcat. I started tomcat, pointed my browser to the URL and everything was fine. Now, there's this weird error that appeared when I tried to run the script shutdown.sh

root@server [/opt/apache-tomcat-5.0.17/bin]# ./shutdown.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE: /opt/apache-tomcat-5.0.17
Using CATALINA_HOME: /opt/apache-tomcat-5.0.17
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /opt/apache-tomcat-5.0.17/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /./usr/jdk1.5.0_07/
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.

what does this error mean?

[Lewin Chan]

That JRE_HOME looks a bit suspicious, while it's syntactically correct in the sense that the canonical resolution of /./usr/jdk1.5.0_07/ is in fact /usr/jdk1.5.0_07, you might be confusing something.

startup and shutdown.sh eventually call "catalina.sh". You should have a look at that, with particular reference to the "variables" that are documented at the top of file (JAVA_OPTS / CATALINA_OPTS being common culprits).

Scroll down to the section that actually does the "-stop", and echo the command line it's executing. you'd end up with something like.

  echo  "$_RUNJAVA" $JAVA_OPTS $CATALINA_OPTS \
    -Djava.endorsed.dirs="$JAVA_ENDORSED_DIRS" -classpath "$CLASSPATH" \
    -Dcatalina.base="$CATALINA_BASE" \
    -Dcatalina.home="$CATALINA_HOME" \
    -Djava.io.tmpdir="$CATALINA_TMPDIR" \
    org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap "$@" stop
 
  "$_RUNJAVA" $JAVA_OPTS $CATALINA_OPTS \
    -Djava.endorsed.dirs="$JAVA_ENDORSED_DIRS" -classpath "$CLASSPATH" \
    -Dcatalina.base="$CATALINA_BASE" \
    -Dcatalina.home="$CATALINA_HOME" \
    -Djava.io.tmpdir="$CATALINA_TMPDIR" \
    org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap "$@" stop

And check for any obvious foolishness (like -Xmx128 which sets your max mem size to be 128 bytes, as opposed to -Xmx128m for instance)

catalina.sh is just a script, nothing terribly complicated.

[uday s]

Hi
1.apart from checking /./usr/jdk1.5.0_07/ make sure your environment varialbles lik JAVA_HOME are set to absolute path not as temporarily for your session.

2.avoid having multiple JDK versions too.
these 2 issues caused me to have same error a while ago

[Timothy Sam]

Hi, here is my .bash_profile and I'm logged in as root

# .bash_profile
 
# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
        . ~/.bashrc
fi
 
# User specific environment and startup programs
 
JAVA_HOME=/./usr/jdk1.5.0_07/
CATALINA_HOME=/./opt/apache-tomcat-5.0.17/
CLASSPATH=.:/./usr/jdk1.5.0_07/jre/lib/ext
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:$JAVA_HOME/bin
 
export JAVA_HOME
export CATALINA_HOME
export CLASSPATH
export PATH
unset USERNAME
 

I set the /./usr/jdk1.5.0_07/ IN JAVA_HOME implicitly because that's where the RPM installed the SDK. I have a 128 MB guaranteed memory just in case you need to know and max RAM of 8GB according to our provider. I'm hosted on a VPS and I think they did not mess up with our server yet by pre-installing it with an SDK or JRE. I'm a litle confused setting the JVM memory (-Xmx128), where and how do I do this. I appreciate your help guys. Thank you.

[Ben Souther]

Are you running low on RAM in this machine?

Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.

[Timothy Sam]

Hi, just want to inform you guys that I solved the problem doing the following steps.

1. Upgrade my plan to a higher RAM, 256 guaranteed this time.
2. The above step still produced the same problem, but I was more sure this time that I had to do something with the JVM. So in my .bash_profile I put the following entries:

JAVA_OPTS='-Xmx128m'
export JAVA_OPTS

Thank you guys! I think this problem is solved. For those people with a VPS with less than 256 MB of guaranteed RAM, I suggest you upgrade to a higher plan. Then specify the above option in your environment variables. Thanks!

[Ben Souther]

Timothy,
Thanks for posting back with your solution.

You may want to consider moving your JAVA_OPTS declaration out of .bash_profile and into {tomcat install}/bin/catalina.sh. You will see notes on this in the header of the shell script.

This setting is specific to one application (Tomcat).
If you have a unix user that is only ever used for running Tomcat, this is not a big deal but if you log into this user for other things, then that environment variable may interfere with some other program.

It's best to keep app specific environment variables as local to that app as possible.