Tomcat won't start

From Foochal

Problem

My tomcat was running for several days, and all of a sudden stopped, and now it won't start. Each attempt to start it silently fails without any log.

Solution

After wasting a log of time, I found the fix which was simple. My catalina.out file had reached a size of 2.0G, which must be some critical size (as far as the OS is concerned) and tomcat was probably dying when trying to open it.

-rw-r--r--  1 tomcat tomcat 2.0G Aug 27 01:56 catalina.out

I deleted the catalina.out and tomcat started without any problems.

The long term fix is to use log rotation for catalina.out.