DSS on VirtualBox "failed to start"

Dyl_M · January 2020

Hello community,

I am a student and I discovered Dataiku very recently as part of a marketing project for the current semester. And I'm encountering some problems with the installation.

I work under Windows 10 with my laptop and desktop computer and I chose VirtualBox as my virtual machine to run DSS.

Unfortunately, I'm having a lot of trouble with my laptop and I don't know if it's a performance problem or an installation problem. Each time I start DSS under VirtualBox, the interface tells me that the startup has failed, as shown in the screenshots.

By searching a bit I saw that a user had encountered the same problem about 3 years ago, without having a convincing answer. Were other people able to solve this problem in the meantime?

I am of course fully prepared to collaborate with the people who could help me solve this problem by giving more information about my work configuration if necessary.

pbertin · January 2020

Hi again

8GB memory should be enough to at least let the VM start properly in its default configuration, so based on your inputs I would indeed agree that the root cause of the problem might be the (lack of) performance of the HDD

I am not sure there is much more you can try here, apart waiting long enough for DSS to start (it might not be necessary to force a restart). Switching to a SSD-based environment would certainly help here if you can locate one near you. You could also get good results with small cloud instances, for which you might be able to find free initial credits.

Sorry for the less-than-satisfying initial experience - hope you can find a way to really discover and enjoy DSS.
Patrice, Dataiku

MickaelH · January 2020

Hi,

Have you checked the Prerequisites listed in:

?

If yes you can try to log into the VM console. To do that:

Log into the VM with the credentials provided just before (Console login: ...)
Check the current state of your DSS instance by typing: dss/bin/dss status
If any of the 3 process is flagged as RUNNING you can try manually restarting the DSS instance with the command: dss/bin/dss restart
If none is RUNNING, try starting the instance manually with the following command: dss/bin/dss start

If none of the previous commands resolved the problem, you should look for errors in the logs that can be found in the folder dss/run/.

As you are on Windows 10 you could also try to follow the Install On Windows.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

pbertin · January 2020

Hi Dyl_M

one possible cause for this symptom would be that you are running the Dataiku VM on a Windows PC which does not have enough memory available. In that case, starting up the DSS application within the VM takes a very long time, longer than the configured timeout, which produces this error message.

Note that the application could still be able to complete its startup sequence in the background, and may eventually become ready, which you can check by attempting to refresh its login page. It might not be possible to do real work on it in this state however.

Another possibility would be to try reducing the memory configuration of the VM in the VirtualBox configuration panel (for example, from the default 4GB to 3 GB). This may help free enough memory on the PC to restore an acceptable startup time, although of course DSS itself will then be more limited in what it can work on. You could also try closing some non-essential, memory-hungry programs which could be running on the PC at the same time.

If none of the above works, it would be necessary to look into the VM itself for DSS startup log files, so as to get a more precise idea of the startup error cause. The file to look at would be /home/dataiku/dss/run/backend.log

Hope this helps

Patrice, Dataiku

Dyl_M · January 2020

Thank you very much @MickaelH
and @pbertin
for your answers.

I tried the manipulations you indicated. And it seems that the problem is now "half solved".

@pbertin
wrote:

one possible cause for this symptom would be that you are running the Dataiku VM on a Windows PC which does not have enough memory available. In that case, starting up the DSS application within the VM takes a very long time, longer than the configured timeout, which produces this error message.
[...]
Another possibility would be to try reducing the memory configuration of the VM in the VirtualBox configuration panel (for example, from the default 4GB to 3 GB). This may help free enough memory on the PC to restore an acceptable startup time, although of course DSS itself will then be more limited in what it can work on. You could also try closing some non-essential, memory-hungry programs which could be running on the PC at the same time.

I think it's a plausible explanation for my problem since my laptop is a low tier one, with 8GB of RAM installed, for only 6.95GB available (combined with a cheap processor and probably a poor HDD)... So I reduced the memory to 3GB for the configuration as you suggested. But this is with the command lines suggested by Mickael that I succeced to "half-solve" the problem.

@MickaelH
wrote:
[...]
3. If any of the 3 process is flagged as RUNNING you can try manually restarting the DSS instance with the command: dss/bin/dss restart
[...]

I have to do this everytime I want to login but it works. I don't know why or how but after waiting a few second for the thing to restart it finally works.

The console also indicate a warning message about DSS took to much time to restart, but it works anyway.

Then you suggested me to check the log to find the problem, but I do not have the "permission" to do it... Could you please help me out (again) with this problem?

And Mickael also told me to try the setup procedure for Windows. The thing is I already "try it", before trying the VM setup, but I did not understand the full process because I am a newbie with virtual machine and subsystem.

From the extraction phase of the ".tar.gz" file, I got completly lost, trying things without knowing what I was even doing so I gave up on this solution to try VM setup instead (but I am not against some help, that said ^^').

MickaelH · January 2020

To answer your last questions to read a file you have multiple tools like vi or less for example.

You could for example type: less /home/dataiku/dss/run/backend.log

To extract an archive you can use tar. For example: tar -xzf /path/to/your/archive.tar.gz

But you will probably need more knowledges on shell commands to be able to perform other operations.

Dyl_M · February 2020

Hello again.

The problem did come from the HDD. I did some research to improve HDD's performance, and after some manipulations (stopping Windows programs in the background and defrag the disk), I managed to run DSS with a subsystem (and with the help of friends). I haven't had any problems on my laptop since then. Solving the HDD's problems therefore seems to be the first thing to do.

Thanks a lot @pbertin
and @MickaelH
for your help.

sunidhi_batra · September 2020

Hey, Can you guide me on how to fix the problem? I am having the same problem. I tried but not able to do the first step also.

ngprakash2019 · March 2022

hi,

i am also facing same issue. i am using vmware. i have uninstalled many apps and tried the disc fragmentation to increase the RAM avaialbility, but nothing works. I am still unable to use dataiku.

Regards

Gnanaprakash N

DavidALI · April 3

Hi,

I often have the same problem

Every time the projects in the DSS instance gets complicated and/or big , the VM fails to start.

I Allowed 8G of RAM to the VM ( on the 16 of my computer) but this did not solved the problem.

My hard disk is a high performance SSD

The only solution I found until now is to make frequent backups of all projects and every time the VM does not start anymore, I create a new VM and import all my backups in the new VM. But this is very time consuming .

I am currently trying a new approach : I installed a linux subsystem for windows and run a local instance of DSS . It works so far.

DSS on VirtualBox "failed to start"

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