Chapter 10. Troubleshooting

If your Server suddenly starts consuming too much resources (CPU, memory) despite having been working well before, it might be caused by a running internal Derby DB. Typically, causes are incorrect/incomplete shutdown of Apache Tomcat and parallel (re)start of Apache Tomcat.

Solution: move to a standard (standalone) database.

How to fix this? Redeploy CloverDX Server:

If you are getting this error message during an attempt to start your application server (mostly Tomcat), perform the following actions.

Linux:

This command will help you set a path to the variable on the server.

As a final step, restart the application server.

Windows OS:

Set JAVA_HOME to your JDK installation directory, e.g. C:\Program Files\java\jdk1.8.0.

	Important
	Some CloverDX functions requires JDK to work correctly, therefore we do not recommend having only JRE installed.

Tomcat may sometimes ignore some context parameters. It may cause strange CloverDX Server behavior, since it appears as configured, but only partially. Some parameters are accepted, some are ignored. This issue is rare, however it may occur in some environments. Such behavior is consistent, so restart has no effect. It's possibly related to Tomcat issues: Bug #47516 and Bug #50700 To avoid this, please use a properties file instead of context parameters to configure CloverDX Server.

Tomcat start batch files for Windows aren't configured to create the catalina.out file which contains the standard output of the application. The catalina.out file may be vital when Tomcat isn't started in the console and an issue occurs. Or even when Tomcat is executed in the console, it may be closed automatically just after the error message appears in it.

Please follow these steps to enable catalina.out creation:

Then use the new startup file instead of [Tomcat_home]/bin/startup.bat.

If you are deploying clover.war on the IBM WebSphere server without the context path specified, be sure to check whether it is the only application running in the context root. If you cannot start CloverDX Server on WebSphere, check the log and look for a following message:

The easiest way to fix the issue is to stop all other (sample) applications and leave only clover.war running on the server. That should guarantee the server will be available in the context root from now on (e.g. http://localhost:9080/).

Figure 10.1. CloverDX Server as the only running application on IBM WebSphere

If the Server cannot start and the following message is in the log:

java.sql.SQLException: Failed to start database 'databases/cloverserver'

then see the next exception for details. After that, check settings of the derby.system.home system property. It may point to an unaccessible directory, or files may be locked by another process. We suggest you set a specific directory as the system property.

If you are setting environment variables like clover_license_file or clover_config_file, remember you should not be running more than one CloverDX Server. Therefore, if you ever need to run more instances at once, use other ways of setting parameters (see Part III, “Configuration” for description of all possibilities). The reason is the environment variables are shared by all applications in use causing them to share configurations and fail unexpectedly. Instead of the environment variables, you can use system properties (passed to the application container process using parameter with -D prefix: -Dclover_config_file).

When working with servers, be sure to follow the folder naming rules. Do not use any special characters in the server path, e.g. spaces, accents, diacritics are not recommended. It can produce issues which are hard to find. If you are experiencing weird errors and cannot trace the source of them, install the application server in a safe destination like:

C:\JBoss6\

Similarly, use slashes but never backslashes in paths inside the *.properties files, e.g. when pointing to the CloverDX Server license file. If you incorrectly use a backslash, it will be considered an escape character and the server may not work properly. This is an example of a correct path:

license.file=C:/CloverDX/Server/license.dat

The application server must be executed by an OS user with proper read/write permissions on file system. Problem may occur, if app-server is executed by a root user for the first time, so log and other temp files are created by root user. When the same app-server is executed by another user, it will fail because it cannot write to root's files.

Missing JMS libraries do not cause failure of the server startup, but it is an issue of deployment on an application server, thus it is still related to this chapter.

clover.war itself does not contain jms.jar, so it has to be on an application server's classpath. Most of the application servers have jms.jar by default, but Tomcat, for example, does not. So if the JMS features are needed, the jms.jar has to be added explicitly.

If the "JMS Task" feature is used, there must be third-party libraries on a Server's classpath as well. The same approach is recommended for JMS Reader/Writer components, even if these components allow to specify external libraries. It is due to common memory leak in these libraries which causes "OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space".

CloverDX Server requires MySQL 5 up to version 5.5 included. Using an unsupported JDBC connector for MySQL might cause an exception, for example:

When running CloverDX Server on Java 9 and later, an illegal reflective access warning may occur. For example, below is the warning which appears in the log when Worker is starting:

The warning is a result of changes made in Java 9. (see Understanding Runtime Access Warnings) and has no effect on the function of CloverDX applications.

Note: The solution below applies only to the CloverDX Server + Tomcat 9 bundle. The procedure may differ per application server, so if you run another supported application server and want to suppress the warnings, a combination of the flags (both Tomcat 9 default and those added manually) may be required. The changes must be done by your server administrator.

In CloverDX Server bundled with Tomcat 9, the warning has been disabled by adding the following flags:

to JDK_JAVA_OPTS in setenv.sh/setenv.bat:

on Worker's command line:

Tomcat 9 default flags in catalina.sh/catalina.bat:

When using Tomcat, every web application by default has standard manager implementation configured, and it performs session persistence across restarts. However, CloverDX does not support serialization needed to persist. This causes the following error to appear in the catalina.out log:

In CloverDX Server bundled with Tomcat, session persistence is disabled by default, but if you are using standalone Tomcat, you should disable session persistence by uncommenting the following line in conf/context.xml:

.