I've posted this issue on StackOverflow with screenshots here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9672641/strange-build-status-for-jenkins-maven-submodule
This is Jenkins 1.450 building a Maven 3.0.4 project (as a maven project, not free form) with many submodules. I was noticing some strange behavior that one artifact appeared to have stale classes. When I dug down into that artifact build I noticed it appeared to have several zombie builds running for days/weeks (see screenshot at link), yet no executors were consumed. I didn't follow the "Jenkins hung" process, but restarted both slaves and the master (sorry!). After restarting the main project, which had appeared to be unstable (sadly this is normal for us), now showed all builds as failed! This is "strange issue #1". Digging into the logs I noticed that this particular submodule was throwing an OutOfMemoryError while building, but Jenkins (or Maven?) was labeling it as successful: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread at java.lang.Thread.start0(Native Method) at java.lang.Thread.start(Thread.java:574) at java.lang.Shutdown.runHooks(Shutdown.java:128) at java.lang.Shutdown.sequence(Shutdown.java:173) at java.lang.Shutdown.exit(Shutdown.java:218) at java.lang.Runtime.exit(Runtime.java:90) at java.lang.System.exit(System.java:869) at org.jvnet.hudson.maven3.agent.Maven3Main.main(Maven3Main.java:149) at org.jvnet.hudson.maven3.agent.Maven3Main.main(Maven3Main.java:63) Triggering a new build of foo-main-cobertura #345 Finished: SUCCESS and was building downstream projects despite the fact that the build failed with an OOM error. This is "strange issue #2". I've increased the heap as far as I can with the 32-bit JVM so I'm switching to a 64-bit JVM trying to get a good build for QA. Any ideas about these two issues: 1. Seemingly good/unstable builds switching to red (failed) after Jenkins restart 2. OOM error during build interpreted as successful Thanks, -tim Tim Drury Architect SAP Manufacturing Execution (SAP ME) Supply Chain Management SAP Labs, LLC T +1 404 943 2088 F +1 610 492 2257 mailto:t.dr...@sap.com www.sap.com Please consider the impact on the environment before printing this e-mail.