jsvc, which is used for daemoning Tomcat and other java applications on unix, takes filenames for stdout and stderr as arguments. One thing to be aware of is that when the either of these files reach a size of just over 2 gigabytes, jsvc simply fails. No error message. If you restart the application, it will note that it can’t write to the file and proceeds to write to the console. I saw this behavior using tomcat 5 on fedora core 4 with jsvc 1.0.1 (described here).
I am not sure exactly what the problem is, but when I started tomcat via the normal shell script, it was able to write to that file. The user that jsvc runs as had no limits on file size:
-bash-3.00$ ulimit -a core file size (blocks, -c) 0 data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited file size (blocks, -f) unlimited pending signals (-i) 1024 max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 32 max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited open files (-n) 1024 pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8 POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200 stack size (kbytes, -s) 10240 cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited max user processes (-u) 32764 virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited file locks (-x) unlimited
Therefore, it might be an issue with jsvc. Do note that there are nightly snapshots of jsvc, which might solve the issue. The solution I found is to use the copytruncate option of logrotate.
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Hi, another solution would be to use a named pipe to redirect to a logging solution such as logrotate. I describe how here: http://gabenell.blogspot.com/2009/11/working-around-jsvcs-logging.html
Great solution, Gabe! Thanks for pointing out that named pipes can be another way to deal with JSVC’s limits.
What version of JSVC were you using?