Sunday, November 5, 2017

Essential WebLogic Tuning to Run on Docker and Avoid OOM

Read my previous post about how to run ADF on Docker - Oracle ADF on Docker Container. Docker WebLogic image is based on official Oracle Docker image for FMW infrastructure - OracleFMWInfrastructure. WebLogic container created based on this image runs, but not for long - eventually JVM process eats up all memory and OOM (out of memory) exception is thrown. This is known issue related to JVM running in Docker container - Running a JVM in a Container Without Getting Killed. Good news - we can switch on WebLogic memory management functionality to prevent OOM error while running in Docker container. This WebLogic functionality is turned on with special flag -XX:+ResourceManagement. To set this flag, we need to update startWebLogic.sh script, but probably we dont want to rebuild Docker container. Read below how to achieve this.

First we need to access startWebLogic.sh script from Docker container. Make sure Docker container on your host is running and execute Docker copy command:

docker cp RedSamuraiWLS:/u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/InfraDomain/bin/startWebLogic.sh /Users/andrejusbaranovskis/infra/shared

This will copy startWebLogic.sh file from Docker container to your host system.

Search in startWebLogic.sh script content and search for resource management config. By default it is commented out. Set this string for JAVA_OPTIONS. This enables WebLogic resource management and G1GC garbage collector:

JAVA_OPTIONS="-XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures -XX:+ResourceManagement -XX:+UseG1GC ${SAVE_JAVA_OPTIONS}"

startWebLogic.sh script contains comment, where it recommends to enable this option:


Once JAVA_OPTIONS variable is updated, copy startWebLogic.sh script back to Docker container:

docker cp /Users/andrejusbaranovskis/infra/shared/startWebLogic.sh RedSamuraiWLS:/u01/

Enter into Docker container command prompt (in my case user 501 is root user for Docker container):

docker exec -u 501 -it RedSamuraiWLS bash

Change file permissions for startWebLogic.sh:

chmod 777 startWebLogic.sh

Enter into Docker container as oracle user:

docker exec -it RedSamuraiWLS bash

Copy startWebLogic.sh script from u01 into bin folder (overwrite existing script file):

cp startWebLogic.sh /u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/InfraDomain/bin

Stop Docker container and run docker commit to create new image (which includes change in startWebLogic.sh):

docker commit RedSamuraiWLS abaranovskis/redsamurai-wls:v2

Docker image is created with delta change only, this allows to save space. Run docker images command to verify if new image is created successfully:


Run docker push to upload new image version into Docker repository. Upload will happen fast, because it will upload only delta of changes:

docker push abaranovskis/redsamurai-wls:v2

You should see new image version uploaded into Docker repository:


To run container online, we can login into Digital Ocean console and execute docker run command (I'm using container memory limit -m 4g (4 GB)) -  it will pull and run new image:


Once docker container is running, execute top command in Digital Ocean console to monitor memory consumption. Java process memory consumption should not grow, if there is no user activity in WebLogic server:

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