ORABPEL-05207 Error deploying BPEL archive:Premature end of file

Recently I came across an issue on a SOA 10g server where one of the BPEL processes wasn't loading after server restart. On checking the bpel domain.log file found the below error message
Error while loading process 'XXXX, rev '1.0': Error deploying BPEL archive.An error occurred while attempting to deploy the BPEL archive file "[ domain = default, process = XXXX, revision = 1.0, state = 0, lifecycle = 0 ]"; the exception reported is: Premature end of file.
ORABPEL-05207
Error deploying BPEL archive
An error occurred while attempting to deploy the BPEL archive file "[ domain = default, process = XXXX, revision = 1.0, state = 0, lifecycle = 0 ]"; the exception reported is: Premature end of file.

When Fusion server restart happens the BPEL archive files are loaded from the corresponding temp directories. Apparently the server had reached 100% space utilization and the subsequent server restart caused the bpel.xml for this process to get corrupted (0 KB as shown in highlighted section below). As a result this process was not getting loaded now and gave the error Premature end of file.

$pwd

/soa/OracleAS_1/bpel/domains/defaut/tmp/.bpel_XXXX_1.  0_9f89464f4c3e38.tmp

$ ls -lrt

..

-rw-r----- 1 soauser soauser   0   Jul 27 13:45 bpel.xml

To fix the issue had to redeploy the BPEL process. But the question was how did the server reach 100% space utilization. On digging further, I found that someone had turned on the DEBUG mode for loggers and left it that way for few days....this had generated 40-50 GB log files and filled up the space.

This is the highest mode of logging and should only be turned on if troubleshooting any issues and should be turned off or switched to a lower logging level immediately (especially on Production Servers).

Lessons learnt the hard way :)

Enabling the BPMN Service Engine on EM Console

In order to enable the BPMN Service engine in EM Console, below steps need to be followed:
1. set bpm.enabled=false in setDomainEnv.sh

        EXTRA_JAVA_PROPERTIES="${EXTRA_JAVA_PROPERTIES}  -Dbpm.enabled=true"
        export  EXTRA_JAVA_PROPERTIES

2. Restart the Admin Server for the change to take effect.

How to specify different heap settings for Weblogic Admin Server and Managed Server

It is a general requirement in Dev/QA/PROD environments to have different heap size settings for Admin Server and Managed Server. The usual practice for server start up is as below:

1. Startup the Managed Server from command line
   $nohup ./startWeblogic.sh &
2. Start the Node Manager from command line
  $nohup ./startNodeManager.sh &
3. Start Manager server from Admin console.

Now if we don't specify separate start up parameters for Admin & Managed server, both start with same heap size settings and that is an over kill for Admin server which doesn't require huge heap.

So to set the heap size of the managed server which is managed by NodeManager do the following:

1. You can specify your start up parameters in the "Arguments" field in the console so that they are used when you start the Managed server through the admin console.

2. Modify the nodemanager.properties file and set the StartScriptEnabled value to false. Without this the managed server won't take the changed heap size into effect after restart. It will still taking the values set in setDomainenv.sh script (same as admin server).

3. Restart Node Manager and Managed server for the new parameters to take affect.