Confluence crashes for no apparent reason.

[Felix Norbut]

This is an on-going issue that has been reported in the past. Restarting services does not correct the problem. A re-start of the server is the only way to get Confluence running again. This was happening every couple of months but is growing in frequency. Crashed twice last week and again today.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Community!

In almost all cases, Confluence crashing will be writing the reason into the logs.  Also, if you can't restart it without rebooting the machine, it will be telling you why it is not restarting, again, in the log files.

Start with a read of <confluence home>/logs/atlassian-confluence.log - that is likely to be reporting the problem.  If it's not the application, but the application server (tomcat), then the second thing to read is <confluence install>/log/catalina.out

Third place to look is at what happens when you try to restart it - those two logs again, but after trying to start it up again.  I'd also want to try starting it by hand, with <confluence install>/bin/start-confluence scripts, as the scripts will show errors on-screen directly.

If, however, it just stops dead without mentioning a crash or shutdown in either of those logs, then there is something in the OS killing it dead, or the disk is completely out of space so it can't write (this would also be directly causing a crash - it's probably worth checking as the very first thing, before even looking at the logs as it's a really quick and easy thing to check!)

[Bill Bailey]

As Nic suggest, check the logs. The other issue that has got me in the past is running out of heap memory. A system will work for awhile, then it will crash -- so your symptoms are similar.

The other issue to check is to make sure you are not being impacted by this issue:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-security-advisory-2021-08-25-1077906215.html 

The same thing can also happen if you have some bot running that chews up CPU and memory resources. This also happened to me -- cryptominre bot. Rebooting would get Confluence working again, but would crash at some point.