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Community Blog Why Your Active Java Application Containers are Killed

Why Your Active Java Application Containers are Killed

Nowadays container technology is popular, but the containerized deployment of Java applications may meet a problem related to JVM heap size.

When deploying container technology for Java applications, you may meet a problem: although you have set container resource restrictions, the active Java application containers are inexplicably killed by OOM Killer.

This problem is the result of a very common mistake: the failure to correctly set container resource restrictions and the corresponding JVM(Java Virtual Machine) heap size.

In this article, we take a Tomcat application as an example.

  1. The app in the pod is an initialization container, responsible for copying one JSP application to the "webapps" directory of the Tomcat container. Note: In the image, the JSP application index.jsp is used to display JVM and system resource information.
  2. The Tomcat container remains active and we have restricted the maximum memory usage to 256 MB.

But when we check the memory status, the system memory in the container is 3,951 MB, but the maximum JVM heap size is 878 MB. Why is this the case? Didn't we set the container resource capacity to 256 MB? In this situation, the application memory usage exceeds 256 MB, but the JVM has not implemented garbage collection (GC). Rather, the JVM process is directly killed by the system's OOM killer.

The root cause of the problem:

  1. If we do not set a JVM heap size, the maximum heap size is set by default based on the memory size of the host environment.
  2. Docker containers use cgroups to limit the resources used by processes. Therefore, if the JVM in the container still uses the default settings based on the host environment memory and CPU cores, this results in incorrect JVM heap calculation.

But now the Java community supports auto sensing of container resource restrictions in Java SE 8u131+ and JDK 9: https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/java-se-support-for-docker-cpu-and-memory-limits . For how to solve this problem in details, you can go to Kubernetes Demystified: Restrictions on Java Application Resources.

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Alibaba Clouder

2,605 posts | 747 followers

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