Confluence Cache Exception

[BBC Application Admin Team]

One of our user macros is throwing a 'Broken Macro' error.
 
We keep seeing this error since the reports of the broken macro

com.atlassian.cache.CacheException: java.lang.NullPointerException

We've tried increasing the logging level on com.atlassian.cache.CacheException which doesnt result in anything extra.
 
Cache has been cleared / Confluence restarted.
 
Have you experienced this before?

[BBC Application Admin Team]

As above

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, but you've tried the first thing that usually fixes it.

We will need to see more of the log around the error, and probably the macro definition as well.

[BBC Application Admin Team]

Hi Nic,

Thanks for taking a look.

Macro Definition - everything was taken out of the definition but the error still persists.

Even with the macro deleted we still get the error =

Errors from log :

{ "message": "com.atlassian.cache.CacheException: java.lang.NullPointerException", "time": "2017-07-21T10:37:14+01:00" }

{ "message": "com.atlassian.cache.CacheException: java.lang.NullPointerException", "time": "2017-07-21T10:37:14+01:00" }

{ "message": "com.atlassian.cache.CacheException: java.lang.NullPointerException", "time": "2017-07-21T10:37:14+01:00" }

Strangely this occurred a few months back and resolved itself without any manual intervention.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Without the macro definition, I can't really get a grip on this at all.

However, there is another thing to try - delete the user macro completely (as you've blanked it out, it's not doing anything anyway).   Re-index Confluence, and restart it.  You should then get pages with "unknown macro" on them, but it should have cleared out all the caches.

[BBC Application Admin Team]

Deleted Macro which resulted in no immediate effect. Left for 24hrs~ and then we got the 'unknown macro' error. Reinstated macro and all is well again.

Possibly some sort of background indexing that rebuilt caches maybe?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There is caching that will affect data in macros.

If it happens again, then try going to Admin -> Caches.  Look for any cache mentioning macros or page data and flush the cache, then retry the pages.

[BBC Application Admin Team]

Thanks Nic