Tomcat 7 fail to start

Question

I have Tomcat 7 running as service on win 7 server over a year now without any problems
Server has plenty or HDD and memory,
Today the server was down, trying to start it i am getting the error:

2012-06-13 15:15:22 
Commons Daemon procrun stdout initialized
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Unable to load native library: Can't find dependent libraries

I switched the vm parameter on the java tab of the service properties from:
C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\client\jvm.dll
to:
C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_23\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll

And now its seems to work fine.
What could be the cause of this error out of the blue?
Thank you

Answer 1

I did a reinstall of JRE to version 6u25 and Tomcat was able to start again.

I guess something must have messed up the JRE depenencies. The only recent installations on the server was a couple of days ago. Before that it had not been changed since the beginning of the year. I list the recent installations here for reference but I do not claim to know that they were the cause of the problem:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Objects (x64)
• Microsoft Web Platform Installer 3.0
• Microsoft SQL Server System CLR Types (x64)
• Microsoft Web Deploy 2.0
• Google Chrome

Answer 2

AFAIK,

the Sun/Oracle Java 6 SDK installer on Windows installs another JRE inside of its JDK folder.

Obviously something "happened" on your server's "normal" JRE installation, maybe an update failed, or someone has uninstalled what seemed to be a redundant duplicate of the JRE.

There is/was a known issue with the JRE installer:

http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7114143

There are two different JVMs the "client" vm and the "server" vm, on some systems you will only find either the server or the client vm version, on some systems both.

C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\client\jvm.dll and/or C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\server\jvm.dll

The expected behaviour on Windows for Java 6 is to install always a client jvm:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/vm/server-class.html

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/hotspotfaq-138619.html#compiler_types