What's wrong with my Ubuntu setup?

[Josh James]

Atlassian Crowd* is taking about 20 minutes to start, which makes system administration very time consuming!

My machine is a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 x64 Digital Ocean VM with 4 GB RAM.**

Here is a simple installation script that exhibits the problem.***

# How to reproduce Crowd Ubuntu problem.
# Spin up a new Ubuntu 14.04 x64 LTS server.
# SSH in as root

# Install Oracle JDK 8
# https://launchpad.net/~webupd8team/+archive/ubuntu/java
add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install oracle-java8-installer
apt-get install oracle-java8-set-default

# Download Crowd
wget https://www.atlassian.com/software/crowd/downloads/binary/atlassian-crowd-2.8.3.tar.gz
tar --extract --gzip --file atlassian-crowd-2.8.3.tar.gz

# Install Crowd
mkdir /opt/atlassian
mv atlassian-crowd-2.8.3 /opt/atlassian/crowd
chown -R root /opt/atlassian
chgrp -R root /opt/atlassian

# Set up Crowd home
mkdir --parents /var/atlassian/application-data/crowd-home
echo 'crowd.home = /var/atlassian/application-data/crowd-home' > /opt/atlassian/crowd/crowd-webapp/WEB-INF/classes/crowd-init.properties

reboot

# Start Crowd
/opt/atlassian/crowd/start_crowd.sh
# Wait a minute until CPU settles down.
# Try to go to http://[IP ADDRESS]:8095/
# Wait a looooooooong time for Crowd to respond.

* I get the same problem with JIRA and Confluence.

** I also tried Debian.

*** This is just a minimal testing script that exhibits the problem, not for production.

The problem is that it takes about 20+ minutes for Crowd to start responding. The start script shows this on the console:

# /opt/atlassian/crowd/start_crowd.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /opt/atlassian/crowd/apache-tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /opt/atlassian/crowd/apache-tomcat
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /opt/atlassian/crowd/apache-tomcat/temp
Using JRE_HOME:        /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle
Using CLASSPATH:       /opt/atlassian/crowd/apache-tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/opt                                                                                                    /atlassian/crowd/apache-tomcat/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
Tomcat started.

Then Crowd's CPU usage goes up for about 10-20 seconds while it starts up. Then it hangs, giving no response on port 8085 (for web browser requests) or 8020 (for the stop_crowd.sh script). There is nothing written to the Crowd home directory. About 20 minutes later, it suddenly works just fine, suggesting a timeout of some sort.

I've contacted Atlassian support, but I guess he's too busy and we aren't getting anywhere fast. Has anyone here run into the same problem?

I killed the process while it was hung and made a copy of the logs. They are available at http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=26601200043002880287

[rrudnicki]

Hi Josh, 

Your script looks fine. If you to try start manually Crowd by /opt/atlassian/crowd/start_crowd.sh this still take 20 minutes to start up?

Looking into your logs I’ve found ignoring option MaxPermSize=256m.

Since you are using JAVA 1.8, you don't have more the MaxPermSize parameter, from now you need to use MaxMetaspaceSize.

Regards, 

Renato Rudnicki

[Josh James]

This is the standalone archive (not WAR) version of Crowd that Atlassian ships. I'm just using the start_crowd.sh script that comes with it.