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Tomcat lockup on shutdown

Edit: The Issues were not caused by eclipse or eclipse photon, but by a .Net-Update, which was installed around the same time. If you are looking at this Question because you have similar issues, please check, if you installed such an update recently.

I have recently installed eclipse photon and am using an existing workspace from oxygen. To debug the web-project I am working on, I am starting the tomcat8-server instance out of eclipse (server-view). This has worked in the past, and actually works now as well. However, when restarting the server or terminating it, the javaw.exe tomcat seems to run on is still running and cannot be terminated (not even as administrator). The reason (according to my research) seems to be that the process holds write privileges on a file system, and therefore cannot be safely terminated. My only option so far is to restart the entire (windows) system.

I have tried so far:

  • ending the process tree (both as base user and admin) -> access denied
  • ending the process (both as base user and admin) -> access denied
  • terminating the process from the shell (cmd and cygwin - both as base user and admin) -> Could not be terminated... No instance running (I am translating this from german, so the wording might be slightly different)

It seems like the eclipse hook into tomcat somehow fails to properly terminate the tomcat process, leaving it crippled and interminable. In this mode, the ports the server occupies remain blocked for other processes, so restarting tomcat will result in an error: "'Starting ...' has encountered a problem. Several ports (...) required by ... are already in use. [...]" and so forth.

Did anyone experience that same problem, and/or has found a solution?

To clarify: I am not looking for a way to force-stop the broken process, which seems impossible. I am looking for a solution to not have the server crash irreparably in the first place.

Solution

  • As users Cathy and pke have pointed out, a Windows-update (More specifically a .Net-Update) was the culprit for the issues at hand. After uninstalling the update KB4087364 (I am running Win 7), the problem vanished. The update seems to cause the following problem:

    Addresses an issue that occurs when an administrator tries to stop the World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC). The W3SVC remains in a "stopping" state, but cannot fully stop or it cannot be restarted.

    It remains to note, that there seems to be a fix for this issue with "KB4338821", which I have not tested. It can be downloaded here: http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB4338821 As I have not taken this way myself, I can only link the update, not guarantee success. I have now tested this, and it works perfectly for me!