Roy's musings

Monitors in Java are in reality mutex + conditional variables. Silly note, but I think understanding this is essential. A theoretical background of monitors could be found in the wiki .

We have a web application running in Tomcat. Today I ran into an issue that the web application started throwing some errors during start up. I wanted to figure what the application reads during the start up. So I started the whole Tomcat under strace , and started to analyze the strace output. Once I figured what was happening, I tried to stop strace with Ctrl-C, but it won't stop. So, I killed it with "kill -9". The strace is dead, but the Java process that was being traced went into a defunct state. This is what I was seeing when I did a "ps aux": 9929 1932 0.0 0.0 0 0 pts/0 Z 16:53 0:03 [java <defunct>] Hmm ... Not good! I tried to kill this process with "kill -9", but it won't work. If I try to start another instance of Tomcat, it complains that the port 8989, where it was supposed to listen, was already in use. But if I try to do a "netstat -pan", I couldn't find any process listening in that port eit