I ran into this issue recently, and as BrianC indicated it can be an out of memory condition. In my case I could successfully start cassandra with sudo cassandra -f
but not with /etc/init.d/cassandra start
.
For me, the last log entry in /var/log/cassandra/system.log
when starting as a service was:
INFO [main] 2015-04-30 10:58:16,234 CassandraDaemon.java (line 248) Classpath: /etc/cassandra:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/antlr-3.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/commons-cli-1.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/commons-codec-1.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/commons-lang3-3.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/compress-lzf-0.8.4.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/concurrentlinkedhashmap-lru-1.3.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/disruptor-3.0.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/guava-15.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/high-scale-lib-1.1.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jackson-core-asl-1.9.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jackson-mapper-asl-1.9.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jamm-0.2.5.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jbcrypt-0.3m.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jline-1.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/json-simple-1.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/libthrift-0.9.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/lz4-1.2.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/metrics-core-2.2.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/netty-3.6.6.Final.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/reporter-config-2.1.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/servlet-api-2.5-20081211.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/slf4j-api-1.7.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.7.2.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/snakeyaml-1.11.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/snappy-java-1.0.5.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/snaptree-0.1.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/super-csv-2.1.0.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/thrift-server-0.3.7.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/apache-cassandra-2.0.14.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/apache-cassandra-thrift-2.0.14.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/apache-cassandra.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/stress.jar:/usr/share/java/jna.jar::/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jamm-0.2.5.jar:/usr/share/cassandra/lib/jamm-0.2.5.jar
And nothing afterwards. If it is a memory problem you should be able to verify this in your syslog. If if contains something like:
Apr 30 10:53:39 dev kernel: [1173246.957818] Out of memory: Kill process 8229 (java) score 132 or sacrifice child
Apr 30 10:53:39 dev kernel: [1173246.957831] Killed process 8229 (java) total-vm:634084kB, anon-rss:286772kB, file-rss:12676kB
Increase your ram. In my case I increased it to 2GB and it started fine.