OpenFire 3.6.4 on Windows 2003 R2 Service keep dying

Openfire Openfire Support
1

I have the openfire service installed as a windows service and it runs just fine. However, pretty much everyday, the process is essentially hung. I cannot login via spark nor can I log into the web admin console. If I try to restart the Windows Service from the Services control panel, it sits for a long while trying to stop the service eventually giving up in vain. I then have to openthe task manager, kill the openfire-service.exe process and then start it again.

Then all is well again for another 6-8 hours.

If the spark client is logged in during this time, it remains apparently logged in but sending messages to anyone is comparable to praying for riches. The messages never get delivered to any other spark user in the same boat. Logging out of Spark yields a similar situation when the server process is dead. Spark simply hangs.

Let me know what logs might be pertinent and I can post those.

We run the openfire-service.exe on a Windows x86 2003 R2, 4Gb RAM server with MSSQL 2005 SP3 (sparately hosted) and LDAP (AD separately hosted) authentication. It’s also tied to Our Jive Employee SBS server (running on a Centos 5 box).

Help and thank you,

Frank.

2

do you have anything else running on this server? how many users do you have? it sounds almost like you are running out of memory. do you get any errors in yoru openfire logs?

3

We were having this exact same issue on Windows 2000 Server just recently.

The fix for us here was to increase the memory allocated to the Java VM.

Check your logs in the Openfire Server for Java Heap Space errors.

The solution is to create a OPENFIRE-SERVICE.VMOPTIONS file in the BIN directory of your Openfire install.

Inside the text file put these two entries:

-Xms512m
-Xmx1024m

Now when you start up your Openfire Service it will have a lot more room and won’t crash.

4

Thanks both Speedy and Kommie.

It does seem like I’m running out of heap space. In fact, I decided to stop the service and just run the Windows Daemon and keep my user logged in to see if it would give me any additional info. The daemon in the openfire monitor shows that I have an “out of heap space” error :

the warn.log shows…

2010.07.09 02:37:11 EXCEPTION
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

Last week on 7/8/2010, I had, per Kommie’s suggestion, created in the c:\program files\openfire\bin folder the openfire-service.vmoptions file with the two lines to set min and max for heap space. As can be seen above, the service still ran out somehow.

ANy other ideas? Can I try tweaking the min and max?

Again, thanks for the responses.

5

Openfires up to and including version 3.6.4 suffer from a memory leak in its PEP component. If your Openfire domain is crashing with OutOfMemoryExceptions, you might be having this problem.

As a workaround, you can disable PEP, by setting the Openfire property xmpp.pep.enabled to false.

More information can be found in this discussion: Openfire 3.6.4 memory leak with Empathy

6

Thank you Guus,

The thread sounds familiar. I’ve disabled pep and will see if the errors continue.