vc-ws1a-broker health status becomes unknown due to java.lang.OutOfMemoryError in the accesscontrol service

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• The vc-ws1a-broker status changes from green to unknown.
  
  
• The /var/log/vmware/vc-ws1a-broker/accesscontrol-service.log file contains a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError.
   Note: The exact context surrounding this error in the log may vary.
  
  
• The /var/log/vmware/vc-ws1a-broker/accesscontrol-gc.log file indicates highly frequent Full Garbage Collection (GC) pauses, similar to the following:
  
  [YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:35.170+0000] GC(1387169) Pause Full (Allocation Failure) 121M->121M(121M) 177.824ms
[YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:35.351+0000] GC(1387170) Pause Full (Allocation Failure) 121M->121M(121M) 180.136ms
[YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:35.528+0000] GC(1387171) Pause Full (Allocation Failure) 121M->121M(121M) 176.117ms
[YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:35.706+0000] GC(1387172) Pause Full (Allocation Failure) 121M->121M(121M) 176.299ms
[YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:35.884+0000] GC(1387173) Pause Full (Allocation Failure) 121M->121M(121M) 177.120ms

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.x
VMware vCenter Server 9.0.1 and earlier

Cause

This issue is caused by a known JDK bug (JDK-8330017).
The ForkJoinPool stops executing tasks, leading to memory exhaustion due to accumulated ForkJoinTask references.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in vCenter Server 9.0.2, which includes the updated JDK (17.0.17 LTS).

To temporarily work around this issue, restart the vc-ws1a-broker service by running the following command:

service-control --restart vc-ws1a-broker