JBoss service shutdown upon user logout

[dk2]

I was going to post this as a question but we got the answer so I thought I'd post that instead. The root cause is Windows/Java not JBoss but I hope no one minds me posting it here.

We have jboss-5.0.0.GA deployed on Win XP and Win 2003 servers. We deployed it as a windows service using Activeplus ServiceMill. We did not use %JBOSS_DIST%\bin\service.bat because the accompanying jbosssvc.exe did not work for us. The service was set to run as user XYZ. What we found was that if we logged in as any user (could be different from XYZ), then logged out, Win XP would terminate the jboss service. The behavior did not occur on Win 2003. In server.log, the termination looked like any normal shutdown, the question was just "what is making it shutdown?":

2009-10-19 08:59:32,867 INFO [org.jboss.bootstrap.microcontainer.ServerImpl] (JBoss Shutdown Hook) Runtime shutdown hook called, forceHalt: true

The problem was solved by copying this from service.bat to run.bat:

REM Suppress killing service on logoff event
set JAVA_OPTS=-Xrs

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/tooldocs/solaris/java.html: java -Xrs suppresses kill signals.

So what I learned here and hope to share is that Win XP sends a kill signal to user processes upon logout, and Win 2003 does not. And "java -Xrs" tells the jboss jvm to ignore the kill signal.

[jaikiran]

Thanks for sharing this. For information like this, the community wiki (which every registered user, including you, is provided write access) http://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/ is the best place to share such information.

For example here http://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/JBoss5FAQ. Feel free to add this or any such informative articles to the wiki.

We did not use %JBOSS_DIST%\bin\service.bat

Just a FYI - If the service.bat was used, it would have handled this specific case, since it specifically sets this param:

set JAVA_OPTS=-Xrs

but unfortunately, in it's current form leads to a different issue https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBAS-7290