Question

I’m wondering how to avoid getting this exception when I use an MBean with JConsole to remotely execute a shutdown, which calls System.exit(1). I’ve verified I get no exception when shutdown is not called so everything else is set up right. Error is:

Problem invoking shutdown: java.rmi.UnmarshalException: Error unmarshaling return header; nested exception is: java.io.EOFException

Which certainly makes sense! I just don’t want this to be an error condition.

Answer 1

This is expected. I assume that your JMX operation is what initiated the System.exit(1)? It means that Jconsole was waiting for a response from the server and none was sent before the socket was closed. Even calling a void method via JMX waits for an acknowledgement so jconsole can say “Method successfully invoked”. Since the server is shutting down, it makes sense that you don’t get a response.

If you want to avoid this you can fork a thread to sleep a bit and then issue the exit. Something like:

 public String jmxShutdown() {
     new Thread(new Runnable() {
         public void run() {
             try {
                Thread.sleep(100);
             } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                // ignored
             }
             System.exit(1);
         }
     });
     return "Shutting down";
 }