"Forked Java VM exited abnormally" error from junit tests

Question

I have a java junit test that passes when run alone on a development machine. We also have a hudson job which runs all the tests, invoked via ant, on a Mac OS X 10.4 node with Java 1.5. The test was passing in the hudson build until recently but now (with no related code changes) one test fails everytime with the following error:

Error Message

Forked Java VM exited abnormally. Please note the time in the report does not reflect the time until the VM exit.

Stacktrace

junit.framework.AssertionFailedError: Forked Java VM exited abnormally. Please note the time in the report does not reflect the time until the VM exit.

googling shows many others seem to have run into the same problem but there I couldn't find any answer.

Answer 1

I faced a similar issue. I ran the junit tests as an ant task. I added the showoutput="yes" ant junit property and ran the ant junit task. It then showed the exception stack trace that caused the forked jvm to exit.