Confluence hangs when logging in

[Joe Pecsi]

Hello everyone, we are currently running Confluence 6.1.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 Server.  Confluence is joined to our active directory (Windows Server 2012 R2) and I running it behind apache (in order to have a friendly URL on port 443 with auto-redirect from 80).

Over the last few weeks we have noticed that we have a lot of trouble logging in. Sometimes it'll hang for a few minutes and report an error, or it won't do anything. Usually refreshing a few times or closing/re-opening the page fixes it.  This is obviously not ideal, and has become a huge pain in the butt (we are also experiencing these issues on a separate JIRA server as well).  Below is an excerpt of the errors I am seeing (over and over and over again):

31-Jan-2018 06:08:09.277 WARNING [ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Standalone]]] org.apache.catalina.valves.StuckThreadDetectionValve.notifyStuckThreadCompleted Thread "http-nio-8090-exec-4" (id=191) was previously reported to be stuck but has completed. It was active for approximately 120,145 milliseconds. There is/are still 1 thread(s) that are monitored by this Valve and may be stuck.
31-Jan-2018 06:08:39.294 WARNING [ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Standalone]]] org.apache.catalina.valves.StuckThreadDetectionValve.notifyStuckThreadCompleted Thread "http-nio-8090-exec-10" (id=209) was previously reported to be stuck but has completed. It was active for approximately 120,086 milliseconds.
31-Jan-2018 06:14:52.116 INFO [http-nio-8090-exec-2] com.sun.jersey.server.impl.application.WebApplicationImpl._initiate Initiating Jersey application, version 'Jersey: 1.8-atlassian-16 03/23/2015 10:20 PM'
31-Jan-2018 06:16:19.496 WARNING [ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Standalone]]] org.apache.catalina.valves.StuckThreadDetectionValve.notifyStuckThreadDetected Thread "http-nio-8090-exec-8" (id=207) has been active for 61,901 milliseconds (since 1/31/18 6:15 AM) to serve the same request for http://wiki.insequenceinc.com/doauthenticate.action and may be stuck (configured threshold for this StuckThreadDetectionValve is 60 seconds). There is/are 1 thread(s) in total that are monitored by this Valve and may be stuck.
java.lang.Throwable
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
at com.sun.jndi.ldap.Connection.readReply(Connection.java:467)
at com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapClient.getSearchReply(LdapClient.java:638)
at com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapClient.search(LdapClient.java:561)
at com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtx.doSearch(LdapCtx.java:1985)
at com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtx.searchAux(LdapCtx.java:1844)
at com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtx.c_search(LdapCtx.java:1769)
at com.sun.jndi.toolkit.ctx.ComponentDirContext.p_search(ComponentDirContext.java:392)
at com.sun.jndi.toolkit.ctx.PartialCompositeDirContext.search(PartialCompositeDirContext.java:358)
at com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapReferralContext.search(LdapReferralContext.java:672)

[AnnWorley · Accepted solution]

From the log snippet you included, (com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapReferralContext.search(LdapReferralContext.java:672) I am suspecting that the Follow Referrals setting may be the culprit. Please see Some users are unable to login due to Active Directory 'follow referrals' configuration

To gather more information, please reproduce the issue and then check the <Confluence_Home>/logs/atlassian-confluence.log for login failures. These messages can be more detailed, with entries indicating bad password, or the remote directory was unavailable during authentication, etc.

[Joe Pecsi]

Perfect, thank you!