How to automatically kill orphaned Java processes - java

I've posted this question before, but didn't get the answer I wanted. The problem I have right now is that there are a number of Java processes getting orphaned. This is both on Linux and Windows. I need a way to FIND which Java processes are the ones that are orphaned and kill them.
NOTE: I CANNOT make changes to the Java code as I have no access to it on any level. I am simply running some tests on my machine. I am aware of solutions like this one
Killing a process using Java
but that is not what I am looking for.

On Linux an orphaned process becomes the child of init, which always has pid 1. To kill java processes that are children of init you can use pkill:
pkill --parent 1 java
To make this automatic you can add this command to cron, for example.

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How to know what program a java process is running [duplicate]

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When a java based application starts to misbehave on a windows machine, you want to be able to kill the process in the task manager if you can't quit the application normally. Most of the time, there's more than one java based application running on my machine. Is there a better way than just randomly killing java.exe processes in hope that you'll hit the correct application eventually?
EDIT: Thank you to all the people who pointed me to Sysinternal's Process Explorer - Exactly what I'm looking for!
Run jps -lv which shows PIDs and command lines of all running Java processes.
Determine PID of the task you want to kill. Then use command:
taskkill /PID <pid>
to kill the misbehaving process.
Download Sysinternal's Process Explorer. It's a task manager much more powerfull than Windows's own manager.
One of it's features is that you can see all the resources that each process is using (like registry keys, hard disk directories, named pipes, etc). So, browsing the resources that each java.exe process holds might help you determine wich one you want to kill. I usually find out by looking for the one that's using a certain log file directory.
If you can't run a GUI application like ProcessExplorer and you're looking for the "Command Line" arguments of the processes then you can use "wmic" via the command line. For example:
wmic PROCESS get Processid,Caption,Commandline
If you want to look for a specific process you can do this:
wmic PROCESS where "name like '%java%'" get Processid,Caption,Commandline
The output from this will show you all of the command line arguments of processes like "java."
Using jps in the JDK will give you more information. More information is display with the -m, -l and -v options.
Have you tried using Process Explorer from SysInternals? It gives a much better idea of what is running within the process. Available free online here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
If you're using Java 6, try jvisualvm from the JDK bin directory.
You could try opening Windows Task Manager, going to the Applications tab, right clicking the application and then selecting "Go To Process". This will automatically highlight the appropriate process in the Processes tab.
In case you're developing software: use a java-launcher. I used for a few of my application [Exe4j][http://www.ej-technologies.com/products/exe4j/overview.html] and it worked very well. When the application is started, it's listed as for example "myserverapp.exe" or "myapp" in the windows tasks manager.
There are other lauchers too (don't known them by heart), few of them might be for free too.
I'd suggest downloading Process Explorer from Sysinternals and looking at the different java.exe processes more closesly, that way you can get a better idea of which one to kill.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
It's very intuitive and you can find the java.exe processes and right click and goto their properties, from there you can see their command line, time of creation, etc which can help you find the process you want to kill.
Hope it helps.
Using ProcessExplorer and hovering over the Java process will show the command line.
If the application is not responding at all, then Process Explorer is a good option.
If it's sort of responding, but not dying, sometimes bringing up task manager, and then moving another dialog over the java process will give you a clue. The java process that's taking up cpu cycles to redraw is the one you're looking for.
Rather than using a third party tool, you can also make a pretty good guess by looking at all the columns in task manager if you know roughly what the various java processes on your system are. From the Processes tab, use View-> Select Columns and add PID, CPU Time, VM Size, and Thread count. Knowing roughly what the process is doing should help narrow it down.
For example, in a client-server app, the server will likely use more memory, have more threads, and have used more CPU time because it has been running longer. If you're killing a process because it's stuck, it might simply be using more CPU right now.
MAX java heap memory is usually directly reflected in VM Size. So if you're using -Xmx flags, the process with the larger setting will have a larger VM Size.

Is it better to launch a Java app once and sleep or repeat launching and killing?

I have a Java application that needs to run several times. Every time it runs, it checks if there's data to process and if so, it processes the data.
I'm trying to figure out what's the best approach (performance, resource consumption, etc.) to do this:
1.- Launch it once, and if there's nothing to process make it sleep (All Java).
2.- Using a bash script to launch the Java app, and when it finishes, sleep (the script) and then relaunch the java app.
I was wondering if it is best to keep the Java app alive (sleeping) or relaunching every time.
It's hard to answer your question without the specific context. On the face of it, your questions sounds like it could be a premature optimization.
Generally, I suggest you do what's easier for you to do (and to maintain), unless you have good reasons not to. Here are some possible good reasons, pick the ones appropriate to your situation:
For sleeping in Java:
The check of whether there's new data is easier in Java
Starting the Java program takes time or other resources, for example if on startup, your program needs to load a bunch of data
Starting the Java process from bash is complex for some reason - maybe it requires you to fiddle with a bunch of environment variables, files or something else.
For re-launching the Java program from bash:
The check of whether there's new data is easier in bash
Getting the Java process to sleep is complex - maybe your Java process is a complex multi-threaded beast, and stopping, and then re-starting the various threads is complicated.
You need the memory in between Java jobs - killing the Java process entirely would free all of its memory.
I would not keep it alive.
Instead of it you can use some Job which runs at defined intervals you can use jenkins or you can use Windows scheduler and configure it to run every 5 minutes (as you wish).
Run a batch file with Windows task scheduler
And from your batch file you can do following:
javac JavaFileName.java // To Compile
java JavaFileName // to execute file
See here how to execute java file from cmd :
How do I run a Java program from the command line on Windows?
I personally would determine it, by the place where the application is working.
if it would be my personal computer, I would use second option with bash script (as resources on my local machine might change a lot, due to extensive use of some other programs and it can happen that at some point I might be running out of memory for example)
if it goes to cloud (amazon, google, whatever) I know exactly what kind of processes are running there (it should not change so dynamically comparing to my local PC) and long running java with some scheduler would be fine for me

Java: Get a process given a pid

Say I have a current running process known, how can I turn this into a Process object in Java?
The process is already running, so I don't want to spawn off another one, I just want to encapsulate it into a Process object that I can use within the java code.
Something along the lines of:
int pid = getPid();
Process proc = magicGetProcess(pid);
thanks
I don't think this is possible using only the builtin library. AFAIK, it is already non-trivial to get the running process' own PID (see the feature request and alternate mechanisms).
A quick look at the java.lang.Process class shows that you could go about writing your custom implementation of java.lang.Process using JNI and native code. Your custom class could then implement extra methods, such as the one in your question.
In *nix world grabbing exit code of a non-child process is not easy, because the exit code simply disappears together with the process as soon as the parent process has picked up the exit code of the child. You can attach to the running process using some tracing tool and pick up its exit code when the process dies. Most *nix OSes have command line tools which will let you do it (such as strace on Linux, truss on SunOS) in a non-intrusive way. However, you can only use them against your own processes or if you run as root. Another alternative is to configure audit subsystem of your OS to record exit codes of all processes.
You can't. Every operation in Process requires that the process is a child process. Not an arbitrary process.
what about using RMI? It it possible to pass a Process object to the Process which it is? Probably not, because Process is not Serializable

How To Start Jetty Properly

this really silly question probably, as no one else seems to be having this problem. In the Jetty documentation it says jar -jar start.jar starts Jetty, and it does. But when I close my SSH console, obviously it dies.
How do I run it PROPERLY?
Is this for running on a production machine that will actually serve up an application running under Jetty? I assume this is the case, since you're asking about starting it properly.
If so, you need a proper process supervision system, such as runit, daemontools, monit, upstart, systemd, or good ol' SysV init.d (as mentioned w/ a gist). Which to use depends on your preferences, business needs, and often, your underlying operating system.
I use and prefer runit. It is built on solid principles (daemontools), and for my preferred distribution (Debian and Ubuntu) it is nicely packaged by the author himself.
Despite being recommended in other answers, and mentioned in comments, starting a long running process in screen/tmux, or via nohup is sub-optimal. You don't have any real control over the process. It won't be restarted if it dies. You have to manually find its PID and otherwise manually manage the service. You have to do more manual work to get the log output (redirection, sending to some random file, etc). You cannot reliably make it depend on other processes, or have other processes depend on it. Decent process supervision systems provide all this functionality for you by default.
If your goal is something else entirely, then please update the question to be more specific about your use case.
java -jar start.jar &
(to run in the background) should also work, though logging won't be transmuted as nice as w/nohup.
This is because killing the shell that started a process (e.g. by logging out) will kill process to unless they're background processes. Screen works since as well since it runs in the background, and screen effectively keeps your session running while you attach/detach.
One way is to use nohup
nohup java -jar start.jar
This has the advantage of writing stdout and stderr to a file
Another way would be to use screen
If you're on a *nix system, the best solution is may be using a script in /etc/init.d (or whatever your system's equivalent is). There's one at https://gist.github.com/404672.
Otherwise, using nohup or screen from the command-line will at least have the process not die when you log out. So will putting the process in the background with &.

Spawn a process in Java that survives a JVM shutdown

I need to spawn a process in Java (under Linux exclusively) that will continue to run after the JVM has exited. How can I do this?
Basically the Java app should spawn an updater which stops the Java app, updates files and then starts it again.
I'm interested in a hack & slash method to just get it working as well as a better design proposal if you have one :)
If you're spawning the process using java.lang.Process it should "just work" - I don't believe the spawned process will die when the JVM exits. You might find that the Ant libraries make it easier for you to control the spawning though.
It does actually "just work", unless you're trying to be clever.
My wrapped java.lang.Process was trying to capture the script's output, so when the JVM died, the script didn't have anywhere to send output so it just dies. If I don't try to capture the output, or the script doesn't generate any or redirects everything to a file or /dev/null, everything works as it should.
I was having trouble with this and the launched process was getting killed when the JVM shutdown.
Redirecting stdout and stderr to a file fixed the issue. I guess the process was tied to the launched java app as by default it was expecting to pass its output to it.
Here's the code that worked for me (minus exception handling):
ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder(cmd);
pb.redirectOutput(logFile);
pb.redirectError(logFile);
Process p = pb.start();
I thought the whole point of Java was that it's fully contained within the JVM. It's kinda hard to run bytecode when there's no runtime.
If you're looking to have a totally separate process you might look into trying to start a second java.exe instance. Although for your application, it might be easier to simply make a synchronized block that stops (but doesn't kill) your app, does the updating, and then re-initializes your app's data.
It won't always "just work". When JVM spawns the child and then shuts down, the child process will also shutdown in some cases. That is expected behaviour of the process. Under WIN32 systems, it just works.
E.g. If WebLogic server was started up by a Java process, and then that process exits, it also sends the shutdown signal to the WebLogic via shutdown hook in JVM, which causes WebLogic to also shutdown.
If it "just works" for you then there is no problem, however if you find yourself in a position that child process also shutsdown with JVM it is worth having a look at the "nohup" command. The process won't respond to SIGTERM signal, but will respond to SIGKILL signal, as well as normal operations.
Update: The way described above is a bit of an overkill. Another way of doing this would be to use "&" on the end of command. This will spawn a new process that is not a child of current java process.
P.S. Sorry for so many updates, I have been learning and trying it from scratch.
>>don't believe the spawned process will die when the JVM exits.
Child process is always dying on my box(SuSE) whenever I kill java. I think, the child process will die if it's dealing with I/O of the parent process(i.e., java)
If you're looking at making an updater on Linux, you're probably barking up the wrong tree. I believe all major linux distros have a package manager built in. You should use the package manager to do your updating. Nothing frustrates me more than programs that try to self-update... (I'm looking at you, Eclipse)

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