Maven surefire plugin hangs forever

Question

My project install was perfectly fine until yesterday but today my install gets stuck at the following,

Apache Maven 2.2.1 (r801777; 2009-08-06 20:16:01+0100)

Java version: 1.6.0_20

[INFO] Surefire report directory: C:\Perforce\project-name\target\surefire-reports

Basically after this line the install does not proceed at all. Any thoughts?

1. I have tried mvn -X and I get the same thing.
2. I have even upgraded to version 2.6 the latest and still get the same issue
3. I have ensured that there are no debug options i.e, the JVM is not waiting for any debugger to attach(-Xdebug options)

Answer 1

Make a thread dump of the correct process using jstack and submit an issue

Answer 2

I passed the forkMode=never and now I noticed that one of the tests was not starting up at all. The reason was that it was using a ehcache and stored entries in the "java.io.tmpdir" directory which was my user's temporary directory.

The system also started being slow from today. Then I noticed that my C:/users/../AppData/Local/Temp folder had about 2 million files most of them either p4ticket234234.txt or Visual studio log files.

Once I cleared these log files, my build went successful. A jconsole or some thread dump would have more indicated the same I think.

Answer 3

Surefire waits for all non-daemon threads in your application to finish. It's easy to miss one or another. For example make sure to call the shutdown method on your Executors if you use any. If you do thread handling on your own you basically have to either make them daemon threads or make sure they terminate. A thread dump might help to spot the lingering threads.