Infinite loop when deploying a war on tomcat 7

Question

I try to deploy a war into Tomcat 7.0.29. I'm having the following log stack :

GRAVE: Error waiting for multi-thread deployment of context descriptors to complete
java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: java.lang.StackOverflowError
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerGet(FutureTask.java:222)
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.get(FutureTask.java:83)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptors(HostConfig.java:574)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployApps(HostConfig.java:470)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.start(HostConfig.java:1413)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.lifecycleEvent(HostConfig.java:313)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:119)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleBase.java:90)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.setStateInternal(LifecycleBase.java:401)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.setState(LifecycleBase.java:346)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.startInternal(ContainerBase.java:1140)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.startInternal(StandardHost.java:785)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$StartChild.call(ContainerBase.java:1559)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$StartChild.call(ContainerBase.java:1549)
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(FutureTask.java:303)
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:138)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662)
Caused by: java.lang.StackOverflowError
    at java.util.HashSet.<init>(HashSet.java:86)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2208)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2227)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2227)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2227)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2227)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2227)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2227)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.populateSCIsForCacheEntry(ContextConfig.java:2227)

(Many stack frames ommited...)

Does anybody face the same problem ?

Answer 1

This is reported upstream as issue #53871 in Tomcat. The problem appears to be with annotation scanning, and Tomcat 7.0.38 includes a clearer error message.

From the bug report:

Due to dependency management problems I deployed a WAR file containing two JAR files containing different versions of a library, where version 1 contained a class A which inherited from B and another version 2 which contained a class B inheriting from A. The classes were loaded in such an order that A and B cyclically inherited from each other which leads to a stack overflow in populateSCIsForCacheEntry because it does not detect cycles in the inheritance tree.

This was exactly the problem in my case: an old version of dom4j bundled an incompatible version of jaxen. The new error diagnostic in 7.0.38 showed exactly which classes formed a loop and I fixed it by upgrading those dependencies.