Problem

Jira fails to start, throwing the following error during the startup process:

OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM warning: INFO: 
os::commit_memory failed; 
error='Cannot allocate memory'

Diagnosis

An error with the following pattern appears at the $JIRA_INSTALL/logs/catalina.out file:

# There is insufficient memory for the Java Runtime Environment to continue.

# Native memory allocation (mmap) failed to map 8589934592 bytes for committing reserved memory.

Cause

In this particular case, the server is unable to allocate 8589934592 bytes (8gb) to the Java Virtual Machine that runs Jira, so it blocks the application from starting up.

Resolution

Check the amount of free memory your server has available, then change the memory allocated to Jira with the steps from this KB article accordingly, making sure that you're not allocating more memory to Jira than the server can provide.