We have two Jenkins instances in operation. One was at revision 1.651 and the other was at Jenkins 1.652. The servers themselves are Linux 2.6.18-402.el5 and 2.6.32-504.16.2.el6.x86_64 Operating system.

I upgraded the Jenkins to 1.653 and checked the restart option through the web UI. The system appeared to come up and run normally, but as the day progresses, the machines began to seem sluggish. I decided to use the

http://<hostname>:8080/restart

option to see if this would have a benefit. Instead, I got a White Screen of Death (WSoD=The web UI would not time out and remained blank/white). I did the same thing to the other server and saw the same result.

I logged into the machine command line for both servers, killed the Jenkins process, moved the ${JENKINS_HOME}/jenkins.war to ${JENKINS_HOME}/jenkins.war.new, copied the ${JENKINS_HOME}/jenkins.war.bak to ${JENKINS_HOME}/jenkins.war, and executed "rm -f nohup.out; nohup java -jar jenkins.war" to restart the process. I then rolled back the slave.jar version (to 2.53.2) on all the slave machines and restarted their connections to the master server as well.

The system recovered and the Jenkins UI was again visible. Based on this experience, I would say there is an issue with the 1.653 release of Jenkins that can cause the White Screen of Death issue very repeatably in our environments after a restart command.