Does Synchrony have to be started separately from Confluence?

Question

I am upgrading Confluence from Server 5.8.8 to Data Center 6.2.3 and I'm having trouble with the Synchrony configration. With Server 6.2.3, Synchrony starts of its own accord when bin/start-confluence.sh is run. With Data Center 6.2.3 Synchrony seems to need to be started separately. That seems counterintuitive. To start Synchrony I have to start a java process from the command line. The command is rather large and unwieldly (see below). Is there a better way to do this? Is there a way to have Confluence start Synchrony automatically? $CATALINA_HOME/synchrony]$ java -Xss2048k -Xmx2g -classpath /opt/atlassian/atlassian-confluence-6.2.3/synchrony/synchrony-standalone.jar:/opt/atlassian/atlassian-confluence-6.2.3/synchrony/mysql-connector-java-5.1.11.jar -Dsynchrony_cluster_impl=hazelcast-btf -Dsynchrony_port=8091 -Dcluster_listen_port=5701 -Dsynchrony_cluster_base_port=25500 -Dcluster_join_type=tcpip -Dcluster_join_tcpip.members=10.128.192.154,10.128.192.161 -Dsynchrony_context_path=/synchrony -Dsynchrony_cluster_bind=10.128.192.154 -Dsynchrony_bind=10.128.192.154 -Dcluster_interfaces=10.128.192.154 -Dsynchrony_service_url=http://sjcwiki02-corp.spockmate.com:8091/synchrony -Djwt_private_key= -Djwt_public_key= -Dsynchrony_database_url=jdbc:mysql://sjcmysql04-corp.spockmate.com:3306/confluence?verifyServerCertificate=false&useSSL=true&requireSSL=true&useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF8&sessionVariables=default_storage_engine=InnoDB -Dsynchrony_database_username=username -Dsynchrony_database_password=password -Dip_whitelist=127.0.0.1,localhost synchrony_core sql

Colin McDermott_GLiNTECH · Answer

So you should probably have this guide for your version of Synchrony:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/run-synchrony-standalone-as-a-service-on-linux-for-confluence-6-4-and-earlier-939504670.html

and later versions:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/run-synchrony-standalone-as-a-service-on-linux-933081078.html

Yes this should start with Confluence. In Linux you have your runlevels and if you know your way around you should have Synchrony start after confluence. in Ubuntu or Redhat you will probably find a /etc/init.d/confluence script. You can have Syncrony start and stop inside there (if you don't know your runlevels or systemd well enough). Best practise would be to add it as a service in your OS (post your OS and ask me how).

WHY?

I would really like Atlassian to chime in here. Synchrony is for collaborative editing and I suspect it runs better as it's own process checking on Confluence, yet would like to get the answer from Atlassian.

Steven F Behnke · Answer

Agreed. You should consider a support case just to get a straight answer from Atlassian. I've had inconsistent experiences with Syncrony. I've spent the vast majority of my time working to get it to proxy correctly and haven't looked deeply into the stop/start scripts yet.

Logan Hawkes · Answer

That seems like the best approach, but I was hoping that Confluence would have a hook or somesuch to do that for me. Considering that the server version starts Synchrony, it seems like a fairly major omission.