WebSphere Application Server & Liberty

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 WebSphere Thread Hang After Upgrading to Windows 11

Zeeshan Naqvi's profile image
Zeeshan Naqvi posted Tue June 17, 2025 02:04 AM

Hi IBM Community,

We recently upgraded our development machine from Windows 10 to Windows 11, and since then, we’ve started encountering thread hang warnings in WebSphere Application Server during application startup. This issue did not exist on Windows 10 under the same setup.

Issue Details

  • Server: WebSphere Application Server (Traditional)

  • App: Legacy monolith EAR application

  • JVM: IBM JDK

  • Database: PostgreSQL 16.1

  • OS (Post-upgrade): Windows 11

  • Problem: During deployment/startup of the auth.war module in our EAR, we are consistently seeing this thread hang warning:

WSVR0605W: Thread "server.startup : 1" has been active for 741331 milliseconds and may be hung.

The thread trace points to our CharacteristicLocator.loadZoneConfigs() method, specifically where SortedSet<Characteristic> chartcs = new TreeSet<>(); is populated. This method internally relies on a custom compareTo() implementation.

Symptoms Observed

  • Startup gets stuck during zone config processing

  • Logs show activity halting around creation of TreeSet<Characteristic>

  • No changes were made in application code or server configs — only OS was upgraded

Troubleshooting done

  • Reviewed compareTo() logic for nulls, exceptions, infinite loops

  • Added verbose logging in the flow

  • Verified same codebase works fine on other machines still running Windows 10

  • No JVM exceptions, GC issues, or DB connection problems in the logs

  • PostgreSQL and JDBC driver versions are the same pre- and post-upgrade

  • Upgraded websphere components to latest versions: IBM HTTP Server for WebSphere Application Server 9.0.5.20, 
    IBM SDK, Java Technology Edition, Version 8 8.0.8.45

Main Ask

Has anyone encountered WebSphere thread hangs or unexpected behavior after upgrading to Windows 11?

  • Are there known compatibility issues between WebSphere and Windows 11?

  • Could any changes in file system, thread scheduling, or JVM behavior on Windows 11 affect this?

  • Are there any specific WebSphere hotfixes or settings we should check for Windows 11 environments?

Happy to share more logs if needed. Appreciate any guidance from those who've faced similar issues or have insight into how Windows 11 might be affecting the WebSphere runtime.

Brian S Paskin's profile image
Brian S Paskin posted Tue June 17, 2025 05:55 PM

Windows 11 isn't in the support matrix but that might be an oversight.  I have customers running it on Win 11 without issue.  Your JDK seem rather new, so did you upgrade the JDK recently after moving to WIn11?  You would need to take 3 thread dumps 1 minute apart when the hang occurs.  We can then see where the hang occurs.  You should open a support ticket so they can look at the thread dumps and see if it is an issue on the system, JDK or somewhere else.

Brian

LI MIN YU's profile image
LI MIN YU posted Wed June 18, 2025 03:14 AM
  1. Try to create a new profile and start without deploy your EAR application, let's confirm WAS and JDK can start smoothly.
  2. Take 3+ thread dumps during WAS start with deploy EAR app with SendSignal.exe : https://github.com/AutoSQA/SendSignal/blob/master/Release/x64/SendSignal.exe

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