I am upgrading from Tomcat 7.0.x to 8.5.5 I receive many exceptions related to annotation scanning like so:
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unable to complete the scan for annotations for web application [/something] due to a StackOverflowError. Possible root causes include a too low setting for -Xss and illegal cyclic inheritance dependencies. The class hierarchy being processed was [org.jaxen.util.AncestorAxisIterator->org.jaxen.util.AncestorOrSelfAxisIterator->org.jaxen.util.AncestorAxisIterator] I am not able to modify the dependency chain leading me to this, so I googled up a couple of possible fixes that didn't work for me: 1. Attempted to disable jar scanning with a <JarScanner> tag with "false" to all scan types in conf/context.xml: <JarScanner scanAllDirectories="false" scanAllFiles="false" scanClassPath="false" scanBootstrapClassPath="false" /> 2. Added all of the jars associated with org.jaxen.util to "tomcat.util.scan.StandardJarScanFilter.jarsToSkip" in conf/catalina.properties These jars were jaxen and xom, which were already excluded from scan by the 8.5.5 defaults. Does anyone have a suggestion of what I might try? Bill