IntelliJ IDEA crashes on startup, plugin error

Question

When trying to start IntelliJ IDEA 14 Ultimate on a newly upgraded OS X Yosemite, I get the following exception in a dialog window, aborting IDEA startup:

Plugin 'DBN' failed to initialize and will be disabled.  Please restart IntelliJ IDEA.

java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.dci.intellij.dbn.DatabaseNavigator PluginClassLoader[DBN, 3.0.3501]
at com.intellij.ide.plugins.cl.PluginClassLoader.loadClass(PluginClassLoader.java:68)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)
at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)
at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:249)
at com.intellij.openapi.components.impl.ComponentManagerImpl$ComponentsRegistry.a(ComponentManagerImpl.java:422)
at com.intellij.openapi.components.impl.ComponentManagerImpl$ComponentsRegistry.a(ComponentManagerImpl.java:412)
at com.intellij.openapi.components.impl.ComponentManagerImpl$ComponentsRegistry.access$000(ComponentManagerImpl.java:398)
at com.intellij.openapi.components.impl.ComponentManagerImpl.a(ComponentManagerImpl.java:107)
at com.intellij.openapi.components.impl.ComponentManagerImpl.init(ComponentManagerImpl.java:86)
at com.intellij.openapi.components.impl.stores.ApplicationStoreImpl.load(ApplicationStoreImpl.java:110)
at com.intellij.openapi.application.impl.ApplicationImpl.load(ApplicationImpl.java:510)
at com.intellij.openapi.application.impl.ApplicationImpl.load(ApplicationImpl.java:492)
at com.intellij.idea.IdeaApplication.run(IdeaApplication.java:158)
at com.intellij.idea.MainImpl$1$1$1.run(MainImpl.java:66)
at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:209)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEventImpl(EventQueue.java:715)
at java.awt.EventQueue.access$400(EventQueue.java:82)
at java.awt.EventQueue$2.run(EventQueue.java:676)
at java.awt.EventQueue$2.run(EventQueue.java:674)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.security.AccessControlContext$1.doIntersectionPrivilege(AccessControlContext.java:86)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:685)
at com.intellij.ide.IdeEventQueue.dispatchEvent(IdeEventQueue.java:364)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(EventDispatchThread.java:296)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(EventDispatchThread.java:211)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:201)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:196)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:188)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:122)

I just installed IDEA 14. It started fine once and updated a lot of plugins. After the restart required for the plugin upgrades, this behavior surfaced.

Before I upgraded to IDEA 14, but after the upgrade to Yosemite, IDEA 13 was already showing similar crashes on startup. It mentioned different plugins though. It was complaining about the flex, GWTStudio and ideTalk plugins. Removing the offending plugin temporarily made it complain about the next.

Answer 1

It turns out that this was caused by OS X Yosemite's different way of setting the max open files limit. This became clear by looking at ~/Library/Logs/IntelliJIdea14, where I saw:

java.io.FileNotFoundException: /Applications/IntelliJ IDEA 14.app/Contents/plugins/devkit/lib/devkit.jar (Too many open files)

It was fixed by adding a /Library/LaunchDaemons/limit.maxfiles.plist file as described on http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/ops/tuning/open-files-limit/#Mac-OS-X.