Unstable builds due to "SEVERE: I/O error in channel Channel to Maven"

[Miguel Almeida]

Hi,

I have a multi-module project where I'm running the Maven goal "clean surefire-report:report".
While the tests pass in our local machines, we're randomly having failures in one of the modules in Jenkins. The console shows:

mavenExecutionResult exceptions not empty
message : Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-surefire-plugin:2.12:test (default-test) on project cm-web: Error occurred in starting fork, check output in log
cause : Error occurred in starting fork, check output in log
Stack trace : 
org.apache.maven.lifecycle.LifecycleExecutionException: Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-surefire-plugin:2.12:test (default-test) on project cm-web: Error occurred in starting fork, check output in log

We have Jenkins running in Tomcat and by running the build and inspecting tomcat's log I see:

SEVERE: I/O error in channel Channel to Maven [java, -cp, /usr/share/tomcat6/.jenkins/plugins/maven-plugin/WEB-INF/lib/maven3-agent-1.2.jar:/usr/share/tomcat6/.jenkins/tools/Jenkins_maven/boot/plexus-classworlds-2.4.jar, org.jvnet.hudson.maven3.agent.Maven3Main, /usr/share/tomcat6/.jenkins/tools/Jenkins_maven, /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps/jenkins/WEB-INF/lib/remoting-2.12.jar, /usr/share/tomcat6/.jenkins/plugins/maven-plugin/WEB-INF/lib/maven3-interceptor-1.2.jar, 40284]
java.io.IOException: Unexpected termination of the channel
    at hudson.remoting.Channel$ReaderThread.run(Channel.java:1133)
Caused by: java.io.EOFException
    at java.io.ObjectInputStream$BlockDataInputStream.peekByte(ObjectInputStream.java:2553)
    at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject0(ObjectInputStream.java:1296)
    at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject(ObjectInputStream.java:350)
    at hudson.remoting.Channel$ReaderThread.run(Channel.java:1127)


The only thing that seems to create a stable build again is restarting tomcat.
Do you know what could be causing this?

Cheers,

Miguel Almeida