Today the power failed, and when the init script tried to start JIRA 4.0b1, it only got as far as the error:

The jira.home directory '/var/lib/jira/4.0b1/data' is already locked by another JIRA instance.

I imagine that tripping over stale lockfiles like this will become a big problem, as any unclean JIRA shutdown then requires manual intervention to fix. Small outages become large ones.

Perhaps we could have a background thread running every 30 secs that calls File.setLastModified(), and if JIRA encounters a file > 30 seconds old, considers it stale and ignores it?