Java Wrapper does whatever it wants

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 08:58:41 +0000

Yesterday I set out to increase the memory settings for a bunch of our ActiveMQ machines. Most of the time these queues work pretty efficiently and their steady-state memory usage is just a few MB, but with some upcoming maintenance we expect these queues to get considerably fuller, so I was growing them preemptively. Anyway, our ActiveMQ installation gets bootstrapped using Java Service Wrapper and the JVM settings for ActiveMQ are managed in some wrapper.conf file. What I wanted to do was pretty straightforward: I increased the VM’s ‘physical’ memory to 16 GB and intended to increase Java’s MaxHeap from its current setting (1536MB aka 1.5GB) to 8192MB (8 GB). In wrapper.conf, I found the “wrapper.java.maxmemory” setting (which was set to 1536), set it to 8192, and restarted ActiveMQ. Here’s where it got weird.

Wrapper on Evan Hoffman

Java Wrapper does whatever it wants