Connection refused / Garbage collection errors

Question

Today, while trying to connect to my JIRA installation at:

https://ns3055913.ip-5-135-162.eu:8080/secure/WelcomeToJIRA.jspa

I get a connection refused. This is the first time this has happened in the month since installing JIRA. Other services on this machine are online. No configuration changes have been made since installing JIRA.

I have already tried running stop-jira.sh and start-jira.sh; this generated a new log file for me to look at which was full of GC allocation failures. Googling indicates this has to do with 'garbage collection,' but I have no idea what this is nor how to correct or 'tune' it - the article about tuning it seemed to require an MS in Computer Science. Sadly, I'm a novice sysadmin so I have no idea how to correct this to get back to our tickets.

We use JIRA for a very non-business approach; managing our chores around the house.

Mizan · Answer

Restart is needed once you update the file. However, 1 GB should be enough for your case. The problem might be resources on your VM. If you are not evaluating JIRA you might want to try Trello for tracking your personal tasks . Hosted , free and Atlassian

Josh Edgar · Answer

Thanks. Since only my wife and I use it for tasks around the house, I'd be surprised if JIRA really needs production-level memory since it's literally only 2 users. I'll look into it though - I'm not sure if this box (a cheap VM) has those resources available.

Once I make the changes to setenv.sh, would I execute it? Or does start-jira.sh execute it once I restart the application?

Mizan · Answer

Based on the information you have provided :

You encountered a Full GC which means that JIRA will not be available to users and fully concentrate on freeing memory, so that it can function normally. However, there is no memory which is unused and all the memory is holded by JIRA so we get an allocation failure error.

Since you restarted, the memory is flushed, but the problem is likely to occur again . When ? we dont know, it can be few days or more.

It seems you are using the default memory settings which comes with JIRA i.e. 1 GB for the Xmx. This setting is for evaluation and may not work perfectly for production use. If this is the case try using 2 GB instead.

This is configured in the file <application-dir>/bin/setenv.sh

Troubleshooting Full GC issues is not straight forward , you will need to generate heap dump and take thread dumps during the incident. Analyze this information using tools like MAT and Thread dump analyzer.

Probable causes are third party add-ons , memory intensive operations, etc

Hope this helps.