Shutdown hook not getting called when running tomcat as a service

Question

I have a shutdown hook as part of a lifecycle <Listener> tomcat6 class, which gets created and registered in the class's constructor (class is referenced in the server.xml). The hook gets called during shutdown when tomcat has been started from a shell, but not when tomcat has been installed as a service. The -Xrs flag doesn't make a difference either way. I am running java 6u12 server VM (haven't tried client) and prior versions. Does anyone have any ideas? This has been tested by starting/stopping from the Control Panel, and also with 'tomcat6 //TS/ServiceName' (i.e. in test mode)
One possibility is that tomcat internally calls Runtime.halt(), but the shutdown process appears to be normal and the same with either scenario. The other possibility is that the JVM has an issue. The tomcat user groups don't have anything to offer.
Thoughts?
tia

Answer 1

sanokistoka wrote:
jschell wrote:
sanokistoka wrote:
Let me ask the last question in a better way: Does anyone have any GOOD ideas?Get back to us when you have found your good solution.Stop wasting bandwidth. I didn't post here to be a smart ars like you and pretend that I have a solution to a rare problem... FYI - the workaround is to use the tomcat lifecycle events (AFTER_STOP_EVENT) to achieve the same - why do you think I mentioned it's a tomcat listener in the first place? Feel free to educate me.
So you are claiming that Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook() that you posted in the above is not part of the java API?
Or perhaps that everything that is added via addShutdownHook() runs?
Surely you are not claiming that it isn't calling addShutdownHook() in the first place?
Get a life and a job.I have both but thanks for the concern.
sanokistoka wrote:
swamyv wrote:
There are free tools available to debug windows. I think gdb is one of them. If you search you can find some good tools.
If you find any good tools that you like share it with us.
Yes I will try gdb (have cygwin) and see where this takes us - not sure if the JVM or tomcat6.exe have the symbols to get a meaningful stack trace. As luck would have it, [https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10565|https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10565] claims that "shutdown hooks are not supported in a container environment" although there is no such restriction in the servlet spec, which would make this a tomcat issue (it does sound like that tomcat6.exe wrapper is somehow involved). Unfortunately, tomcat does NOT issue the AFTER_STOP_EVENT if killed before it has completed its start-up (it appears its own shutdown hook, which sends the event, is not registered until it has fully come up); thus the need for a shutdown hook (at least, up until it's fully up). A shutdown hook is still required in my case for clean-up after tomcat is completely out of the picture. It sounds like the proper architecture here is to really embed tomcat in an application, and create a shutdown hook at the outer level.
Educate me some more. The above description certainly seems like you are suggesting that both of the following are true.
1. It is not a bug in the VM.
2. The problem, for your implementation, is in how the wrapper terminates the windows service.
Perhaps what is actually happening it that addShutdownHook() is never being called at all? Thus of course any processing of the thread associated with that would never, ever run.
And that happens because you are banging on the stop service so fast that it doesn't actually have time to spin up?