Summary

Starting a new or restarting existing Jira Data Center node appears unresponsive for a long time.

Environment

Any Jira Data Center version, Linux or Windows platform.

Diagnosis

$JIRA_HOME/log/atlassian-jira.log* will show exceptions like below on a startup attempt:

Where \\yourfileserver\Shares\Jira would correspond to the $SHARED_HOME drive in your Jira Data Center configuration.

In most cases the 'caused by' statement in the exception will be:

If the above errors show up in the logs, we recommend performing system level troubleshooting  such as verifying that the server has full and unrestricted access to the $SHARED_HOME drive.

This would include network level as well the file server level troubleshooting, for example:

• Ping the file server hosting the $SHARED_HOME drive continuously (i.e. 'ping -t') from the Jira server itself to verify there is no packet loss.
• Copy all the .jar files from the $SHARED_HOME/installed-plugins folder to a local drive and then perform a binary comparison (diff on Linux, fc /b on Windows) of the 'source' and 'target' files - were the files copied successfully and the comparison operations check out?
• Perform a write operation to the $SHARED_HOME folder

(i) For the file system level troubleshooting, please also verify you're logged in to the Jira server with the same user account that is configured to run Jira as it could as well be a file permission issue (though in case of file permissions  'access denied' errors in the logs are usually evident, still worth double checking)

Cause

The most likely cause is due to the environment: something is holding Java from reading the Jira plugins from $SHARED_HOME/plugins/installed-plugins folder consistently. It could be due to a genuine random network issue, or could be an Antivirus on the file server preventing access to the files.

In the above example, the root cause was that an Anti-virus on the file server for some reason marked the .jar files as malware. In this scenario, even though the share and files seemingly appeared as available, the Antivirus prevented Jira nodes from accessing the files, resulting in the Jira startup failure. We were able to identify that there was indeed something preventing the files from being accessed properly when we tried to actually copy the files from the shared home to destination

Certain Anti-virus programs are known to clash with Jira and will either need to be disabled, or configure exceptions on the Jira directories:

• Troubleshoot a Jira Data Center/Server startup failed error
• Common causes for Jira Server crashes and performance issues

Solution

Resolve any underlying network, Antivirus, or file server issue. Once resolved, restart Jira.