Severe exception after upgrading to confluence 5.1.3

[Moinul Rony]

Recently we have upgraded to confluence development to latest 5.1.3.

After a day or two the server started throwing "SEVERE: Exception Processing ErrorPage[errorCode=500, location=/500page.jsp]" while I tried restarting confluence, checking the memory usage the solution was to remove the plugin cache directories.

But soon after that the login page came up as garbled and it started throwing "
confluence java.net.SocketException: Too many open files"

which seems to have resolved after I changed the max open file from 1024 to 4096.

My question is what can assure me that this won't be happening when we upgrade Production confluence. And what was the real reason in the first place for the above mentioned errors.

Moinul Rony

[Daniel Borcherding · Accepted solution]

Moinul,

The assurace we can give in this case are limited. Idealy you have mocked up a test upgrade in an environment that mirrors production as closely as possible. We won't know if you will need to flush your plugin cache in your production upgrade, but it is likely the case.

It is also highly likely that you will need to change the ulimit on production as well.

If you want a better gaurentee of how your upgrade will go in production, perform the mock upgrade again. Clone production over to a new test environment and try the upgrade again, this time performing your mitigations first. If everything goes off without a hitch you can be reasonably certain that your production upgrade will follow suit.