Cassandra won't start in linux as a service

Question

I have a debian linux image running on Google compute. Can successfully get cassandra working with "sudo cassandra" or "sudo cassandra -f" but then as soon as I log off this stops working. But when I try to run this as a service it simply doesnt say anything and doesnt start it either! I installed it using the aptget package v2.1.

I've tried sudo service cassandra start. It looks like its doing something and then quits without any logs.

Please help me run this up as a service. I can't even locate where the logs are stored when I run it as a service.

Answer 1

I ran into this issue recently, and as BrianC indicated it can be an out of memory condition. In my case I could successfully start cassandra with sudo cassandra -f but not with /etc/init.d/cassandra start.

For me, the last log entry in /var/log/cassandra/system.log when starting as a service was:

INFO [main] 2015-04-30 10:58:16,234 CassandraDaemon.java (line 248) Classpath: /etc/cassandra:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/antlr-3.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/commons-cli-1.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/commons-codec-1.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/commons-lang3-3.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/compress-lzf-0.8.4.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/concurrentlinkedhashmap-lru-1.3.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/disruptor-3.0.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/guava-15.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/high-scale-lib-1.1.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jackson-core-asl-1.9.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jackson-mapper-asl-1.9.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jamm-0.2.5.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jbcrypt-0.3m.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jline-1.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/json-simple-1.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/libthrift-0.9.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/lz4-1.2.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/metrics-core-2.2.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/netty-3.6.6.Final.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/reporter-config-2.1.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/servlet-api-2.5-20081211.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/slf4j-api-1.7.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.7.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/snakeyaml-1.11.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/snappy-java-1.0.5.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/snaptree-0.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/super-csv-2.1.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/thrift-server-0.3.7.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/apache-cassandra-2.0.14.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/apache-cassandra-thrift-2.0.14.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/apache-cassandra.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/stress.jar:/usr/share/java/jna.jar::/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jamm-0.2.5.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jamm-0.2.5.jar

And nothing afterwards. If it is a memory problem you should be able to verify this in your syslog. If if contains something like:

Apr 30 10:53:39 dev kernel: [1173246.957818] Out of memory: Kill process 8229 (java) score 132 or sacrifice child
Apr 30 10:53:39 dev kernel: [1173246.957831] Killed process 8229 (java) total-vm:634084kB, anon-rss:286772kB, file-rss:12676kB

Increase your ram. In my case I increased it to 2GB and it started fine.