TeamCIty Server on EC2 Linux instance dies before it's done starting up

Question

I'm installing TeamCity in EC2, starting with the Server then moving on the agents. I'm starting with the Amazon Linux AMI, running on a micro instance. Then I did:

sudo yum update
wget http://download.jetbrains.com/teamcity/TeamCity-7.1.1.tar.gz
tar -xvzf TeamCity-7.1.1.tar.gz
cd TeamCity
bin/teamcity-server.sh start

When I start it using bin/teamcity-server.sh start, things happen. I can connect using a web browser which shows the 'TeamCity is starting' page. The teamcity-server.log shows a bunch of activity, unzipping plugins etc.

But then suddently, the server process just disappears. The port's no longer listened to, ps shows no java process running, and the browser can't connect.

There's no error messages in the catalina or teamcity logs. After much trial and error though, I ran bin/teamcity-server.sh run (instead of start) to get console output, and got the following:

Using CATALINA_BASE:   /home/ec2-user/TeamCity
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /home/ec2-user/TeamCity
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /home/ec2-user/TeamCity/temp
Using JRE_HOME:        /usr/lib/jvm/jre
Using CLASSPATH:       /home/ec2-user/TeamCity/bin/bootstrap.jar:/home/ec2-user/TeamCity/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
Nov 1, 2012 7:22:25 PM org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener init
INFO: The APR based Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.path: /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0.x86_64/jre/lib/amd64/server:/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0.x86_64/jre/lib/amd64:/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0.x86_64/jre/../lib/amd64:/usr/java/packages/lib/amd64:/usr/lib64:/lib64:/lib:/usr/lib
Nov 1, 2012 7:22:26 PM org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol init
INFO: Initializing ProtocolHandler ["http-bio-8111"]
Nov 1, 2012 7:22:26 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina load
INFO: Initialization processed in 2742 ms
Nov 1, 2012 7:22:26 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService startInternal
INFO: Starting service Catalina
Nov 1, 2012 7:22:26 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine startInternal
INFO: Starting Servlet Engine: Apache Tomcat/7.0.23
Nov 1, 2012 7:22:26 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDirectory
INFO: Deploying web application directory /home/ec2-user/TeamCity/webapps/ROOT
Log4J configuration file /home/ec2-user/TeamCity/bin/../conf/teamcity-server-log4j.xml will be monitored with interval 10 seconds.
Nov 1, 2012 7:22:30 PM org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol start
INFO: Starting ProtocolHandler ["http-bio-8111"]
Nov 1, 2012 7:22:30 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina start
INFO: Server startup in 3786 ms
=======================================================================
TeamCity 7.1.1 (build 24074) initialized, OS: Linux, JRE: 1.6.0_24-b24
TeamCity is running in professional mode
bin/teamcity-server.sh: line 18:  4231 Killed                  ./catalina.sh $1

I promise that I did not kill the process! I can find my way around in Linux well enough, but I'm not at all sure where to go next to find out why or what killed the process. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

After some further scanning of .sh files to see how TeamCity was starting itself up, I noticed that it was grabbing a fair amount of memory for it's java process (either 512m or 750m depending on which line you use).

The EC2 micro instance only has 613m of RAM total. When I realized this, I tried the whole process again with a larger instance, and things worked fine.

I'm still curious if there's a better way I could've known what was causing catalina to die, so if anyone wants to answer with that information...