Solved — Is another HiveMQ instance running?

Johan Louwers
2 min readJun 26, 2023
RocksDB

Recently, when trying to run HiveMQ to facilitate a test using an MQTT IOT stream the following error was presented:

ERROR - An error occurred while opening the publish_payload_store persistence. Is another HiveMQ instance running?

Looking at the error message one would be thinking that another HiveMQ instance is running. However, as this was not the case, I turned the HiveMQ logging into debug mode. Changing the log level for HiveMq is done by making a change to the logback.xml file in ./conf/

you have to change the below shown line:

    <root level="${HIVEMQ_LOG_LEVEL:-INFO}">

Into the below to hard code the log level to debug.

<root level="DEBUG">

When setting the log level to debug the system produced some interesting insights, primarily pointing to the RocksDB sub-system of HiveMQ.

2023-06-26 09:03:14,924 DEBUG - Original Exception:
org.rocksdb.RocksDBException: While fsync: a directory: Invalid argument
at org.rocksdb.RocksDB.open(Native Method)
at org.rocksdb.RocksDB.open(Source.java:252)
at hmq.hz.a.a(Source.java:169)
at java.base/java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Executors.java:515)
at java.base/java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:264)
at…

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Johan Louwers

Johan Louwers is a technology enthousiasts with a long background in supporting enterprises and startups alike as CTO, Chief Enterprise Architect and developer.