Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unable to complete the scan for annotations for web application [] due to a StackOverflowError. Possible root causes include a too low setting for -Xss and illegal cyclic inheritance dependencies. The class hierarchy being processed was [org.jaxen.util.AncestorAxisIterator->org.jaxen.util.AncestorOrSelfAxisIterator->org.jaxen.util.AncestorAxisIterator]     at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.checkHandlesTypes(ContextConfig.java:2159)     at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotationsStream(ContextConfig.java:2105)     at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotationsJar(ContextConfig.java:1980)     at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotationsUrl(ContextConfig.java:1946)     at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.processAnnotations(ContextConfig.java:1931)     at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.webConfig(ContextConfig.java:1330)     at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.configureStart(ContextConfig.java:889)     at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.lifecycleEvent(ContextConfig.java:386)     at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:117)     at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleBase.java:90)     at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5479)     at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150)     ... 6 more

**First thing I tried of course was changing the memory settings. However this did not work. No matter how high I set it, it would always give this error.

Solution:

1. This happens in tomcat versions higher than 7.0.33, so downgrading could be one possible solution.

2. jaxen and dom4j don’t play very well together, upgrading to Jaxen-1.1.6 and dom4j-1.6.1 worked for me.