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ElasticSearch- Unrecognized VM option 'UseConcMarkSweepGC'

Upgrading ElasticSearch can be quite challenging(at least for me it was). I talked about some other issues I had while upgrading before. Let's add another one to the list...

After installing ElasticSearch 8.1 I couldn’t get it started. Here is the error I got instead:

12:31:34 » Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException: starting java failed with [1]
12:31:34 »  output:
12:31:34 »  
12:31:34 »  error:
12:31:34 »  Unrecognized VM option 'UseConcMarkSweepGC'
12:31:34 »  Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.
12:31:34 »  Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit.
12:31:34 »  	at org.elasticsearch.tools.launchers.JvmErgonomics.flagsFinal(JvmErgonomics.java:118)
12:31:34 »  	at org.elasticsearch.tools.launchers.JvmErgonomics.finalJvmOptions(JvmErgonomics.java:86)
12:31:34 »  	at org.elasticsearch.tools.launchers.JvmErgonomics.choose(JvmErgonomics.java:59)
12:31:34 »  	at org.elasticsearch.tools.launchers.JvmOptionsParser.main(JvmOptionsParser.java:92)

This error refers to the following setting in my jvm.options file.

But I didn’t do any changes to this file and I was using the OpenJDK distributation that was included with ElasticSearch itself!?

I did multiple attempts to fix this issue:

  • I removed this line from the jvm.options file.
  • I added another options file to the jvm.options.d folder.

None of them made a difference. Finally I found the reason of this error…

I mentioned in the beginning that I was upgrading an ElasticSearch instance. As part of the previous installation an ES_PATH_CONF environment variable was set that is used by ElasticSearch to specify where the configuration should be loaded from.

This environment variable was still pointing to the previous configuration folder(which I didn’t remove yet). The jvm.options file there was valid for the original JDK version but not for the one I was using now as part of the ElasticSearch 8.1 upgrade.

I updated the ES_PATH_CONF environment variable to the correct location and finally the error disappeared.

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