Tomcat 7 “SEVERE: A child container failed during start”

Question

Basically, I\'ve written a springMVC application (with a relatively shotgun my way first-timer approach with regards to Spring). The project works fine on Tomc

Answer 1

This same issue occurred for me and stack trace

SEVERE: A child container failed during start
java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to start component [StandardEngine[Tomcat].StandardHost[localhost].StandardContext[/XXXXSearch]]
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.report(FutureTask.java:122)
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.get(FutureTask.java:192)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.startInternal(ContainerBase.java:1123)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.startInternal(StandardHost.java:800)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$StartChild.call(ContainerBase.java:1559)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$StartChild.call(ContainerBase.java:1549)
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:266)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1142)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:617)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)
Caused by: org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to start component [StandardEngine[Tomcat].StandardHost[localhost].StandardContext[/XXXXSearch]]
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:154)
    ... 6 more
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unable to complete the scan for annotations for web application [/XXXXSearch]. Possible root causes include a too low setting for -Xss and illegal cyclic inheritance dependencies
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotationsStream(ContextConfig.java:2109)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotationsJar(ContextConfig.java:1981)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotationsUrl(ContextConfig.java:1947)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotations(ContextConfig.java:1932)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.webConfig(ContextConfig.java:1326)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.configureStart(ContextConfig.java:878)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.lifecycleEvent(ContextConfig.java:369)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:119)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleBase.java:90)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5179)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150)
    ... 6 more
Caused by: java.lang.StackOverflowError
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2269)

In my analysis what i found was, this issue is occurred when illegal cyclic inheritance dependencies caused for Tomcat startup annotation processing.

But my project had lot of dependency JARs, and couldn't found which one is responsible for this.

After trying so many unhappy approaches What i did was , I have updated my tomcat plugin to following and ran the same scenario,

    org.apache.tomcat.maven
    tomcat8-maven-plugin
    3.0-r1756463
<\plugin>

Then i was able to find which JAR is caused to this issue ,

Aug 23, 2017 2:32:12 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig processAnnotationsJar
SEVERE: Unable to process Jar entry [cryptix/test/TestLOKI91.class] from Jar [jar:file:/C:/Users/Tharinda/.m2/repository/cryptix/cryptix/1.2.2/cryptix-1.2.2.jar!/] for annotations
java.io.EOFException
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.bcel.classfile.FastDataInputStream.readUnsignedShort(FastDataInputStream.java:120)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.bcel.classfile.ClassParser.readAttributes(ClassParser.java:110)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.bcel.classfile.ClassParser.parse(ClassParser.java:94)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotationsStream(ContextConfig.java:1994)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotationsJar(ContextConfig.java:1944)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotationsUrl(ContextConfig.java:1919)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotations(ContextConfig.java:1880)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.webConfig(ContextConfig.java:1149)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.configureStart(ContextConfig.java:771)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.lifecycleEvent(ContextConfig.java:305)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:117)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleBase.java:90)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5120)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$StartChild.call(ContainerBase.java:1408)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$StartChild.call(ContainerBase.java:1398)
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:266)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1142)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:617)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)

Then just solving the issue with cryptix-1.2.2.jar solved this problem.

I strongly recommend to move tomcat8-maven-plugin which seems stable and less buggy at the moment.