dev@glassfish.java.net

Waiting 600,000 milliseconds to start DAS?

From: Byron Nevins <byron.nevins_at_oracle.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:36:23 -0700

I've seen this come up a few times. Developers sitting around waiting
10 minutes for a server to start.

Don't do that!

2 issues:

1) GlassFish will happily hang instead of dying gracefully.
2) When (1) happens it is frequently very early in the startup process.
Before the logging service starts. So nothing will be logged. E.g.,
if anything goes wrong in Felix initialization you will never know about
it if you start the server with "asadmin start-domain". Yes - that's
right. All messages "logged" before the Logging Service starts are
thrown away never to be seen by anyone. All text sent to stdout and
stderr are gone for good.

Solution:
Always always always always start with the --verbose flag. Now you will
see every bit of output -- including Felix errors, services that
blow-up, xml parsing errors, etc. It automatically shows all log
messages. If you hit ^C the server is stopped -- gracefully. The only
time you don't want to use --verbose if for automated tests.

There already is a script that you can run -- it is called "startserv"
and it is in the same directory as asadmin