Crowd as linux service does not kill PID

Summary

Problem

If you installed Crowd as a service on Linux, and found that the process is not being killed, you can try the following:

1. If you are running Crowd 2.8.3 and below, make sure to upgrade to Crowd 2.8.4 or later (includes fix for CWD-4423 - Crowd's Tomcat setenv.sh misses CATALINA_PID variable)

2. Crowd documentation on Setting Crowd to Run Automatically and Use an Unprivileged System User on UNIX is a bit outdated compared to Confluence and JIRA. I opened a feature request for it CWD-4702 - Improve Setting Crowd to Run Automatically Documentation.

3. First recommendation is to migrate Crowd apache service script to look like Confluence or Jira

4. Save and try the script again

5. You might encounter a problem where the process is not killed from the first attempt.

   1 service crowd stop

   Running the stop command another time will finally kill the process.

Diagnosis

Diagnostic Steps

• You could try increasing the wait time for the gracefull shutdown (5 seconds is the default value) to something like 30 seconds

  1 stop-crowd.sh 30

Cause

The thread dumps show that there are multiple threads locked waiting for others. 30 seconds delay did not help to gracefully shutdown crowd.

Solution

Workaround

A workaround is to force the script to shutdown Crowd (killing the process.) In order to do that, modify the tomcat service script to force the process kill

The force flag will execute kill -9 on the PID and Crowd process will be killed.