I have a Java VM that is hanging "randomly". I quote the randomly bit, because there is obviously a reason that the VM is hanging, but the hang does not occur periodically. We have the same software running in different customer environments and in those environments the JVM is not hanging.

In the process of attempting to troubleshoot the hang the process exists with zero CPU utilization. I then attempt to execute kill -3 and the kill command hangs. No JVM Thread Dump is produced.

I have spent time instrumenting the code to periodically log the thread stack traces hoping to catch the JVM in a state that would indicate where the issue lies, but so far this attempt has not born much fruit.

Unfortunately I have not been able to reproduce this issue in my lab environment so I am limited by what can be done at the Customer site.

The OS's in question are Red Hat Enterprise 5.4 and SUSE 10 running java version 1.6.0_05-b13

Has anyone had this problem? Any ideas on why kill -3 is failing to produce a Java Thread Dump?

Thanks!