I ran into an issue recently where when a certain report was run on a specific server the jvm would disappear without a trace! There were no core dumps, no errors in logs just a 500 response from Apache and the process was gone.
I struggled with this for a while as I could regularly reproduce the issue but only on one server. By pure co-incidence I could see the terminal when the application was started and there was a cryptic X11 error message:
X connection to localhost:10.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown)
This server also turned out to be one where we had to sudo su to a different user to start the application and had hacked around with the Magic Cookie for X11 forwarding. This mean that although I had X11 enabled on my session it was broken.
Removing the X11 forwarding from my ssh session fixed the issue. I never managed to work out if it was a bug in the JVM or if it was my broken X11 session sending a kill signal to the process, full details of my digging over the jump.
