NetBeans Support Weblog: Tips , Tricks, Techniques and more

How to diagnose/report ide crashes or when the main window disappers?

When the ide crashes or closes without any error messages, the following tools can be used to diagnose the issue:

1. Try running the ide with a fresh user directory.
   
2. Check the ide log file for any messages and/or stacktraces. The log file is [userdir]/var/log/messages.log. For more info on [userdir] , please take a look at the blog entry on user directory.
   
3. If unable to diagnose the problem, file a bug in issuezilla and attach the log file, thread dump etc to the issue. Please remember to attach them (rather than pasting them directly in the bug, since that makes it harder to view the issue); of course it would be nice if the relevant portions from the log file are pasted in the issue entry, as that would be useful for later searches. (Prior to filing a bug, you can choose to discuss it in nbusers mailing list where it may get resolved).
   
4. If the log file does not have any useful diagnostic info or is not even created, it could indicate a problem with the jdk installation. To get this factor out of the way, check if the sample programs shipped with jdk run without any issues. For instance, try running SwingSet2 that is shipped with jdk. For jdk related issues, please refer to the jdk diagnostics guide. For jdk related issues, you may want to file the issue with the jdk team at bugs.sun.com or java.net sites.
   
5. If there are any server (glassfish,tomcat...) related issues, usually the ide should function except for Java EE features. But there may be cases when the server runs into critical issues resulting in ide crashes. In this case, check the server error log files to see if there are any clues. For glassfish, the log files should be in the glassfish installation directory under the appropriate domain. For tomcat, the log file should be in the tomcat instance that is created in the NetBeans user directory.
6. If the error is due to some specific modules, one workaround is to not load the offending modules (and of course follow up by filing an issue in issuezilla against those modules). You can try narrowing down the issue by commenting out module clusters (except platform and application clusters) from <ide_install_dir>/etc/netbeans.clusters file. If the ide works as expected, uncomment clusters one-by-one to see which cluster is responsible for the crash.
   
7. Under ubuntu, there is a known issue where the NetBeans window is empty. The workaround is to set AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit before running any Java apps.