Problems with email queue on JIRA 3.13.1 Enterprise

Question

I'm on JIRA 3.13.1 Enterprise and recently we began to have problems with the email queue. Suddenly, it stops sending email and you need to go to Administration and execute a Flush Mail Queue.

To resolve the problem definitely, at least for some days, you need to restart the tomcat till it "breaks" again.

Does anyone know how to resolve the issue definitely?

Thanks!!!

unknown · Answer

Increasing memory may help, but the cause of the OOM is the thing that needs fixing, as Nic says, updating will likely help, 3.13.x is really old.

If your environment is relatively static, as Id expect such an instance to be, its possible there was just a 'bump' from an external source, like email, which pushed it over the edge.  Email processing does tend to take up a chunk of memory for large attachments bearing messages, for the duration of processing.  Increasing memory in that case will work.

If you have a memory leak, if this happes more frequently, review any 'recent' changes/addons etc, it will likely not help and just defer an innevitable crash.

- https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Increasing+JIRA+Memory

- https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/Crashes+and+Performance+Issues+Troubleshooting

- https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/JIRA+Performance+Tuning

Daniel Daniel19 · Answer

We've found in the log that the moment when the email sending service stops working coincides when we have a memory error... see the log...

Exception in thread "JiraQuartzScheduler_QuartzSchedulerThread" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

Any help to resolve the memory problem? If you need I have a lot more of log to send you.

Thanks!

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The first issue, where it stops processing and doesn't pick up again does happen if there are networking issues sometimes.   The second one is probably related, but it's hard to tell.

Two things you should look into to begin with

1. Upgrading - you're on an unsupported version of Jira, and later ones have lots of improvements and bug fixes, including some stuff around email

2.  Read your log.  Increase the amount of logging if the plain log doesn't tell you enough to begin with