Addressing TeamCity Agent Shutdowns on Ubuntu 24 under Systemd

October 23, 2026 05:42 Updated

Symptoms

Using MS Azure Cloud Profiles to spin up/down cloud instances running Ubuntu 24.04, build agent service shutdowns unexpectedly during builds. In the teamcity-agent.log file, there are SIGKILL messages such as the following:

Mar 10 12:39:04 az-lnxu24-21 systemd[1]: teamcity-agent.service: State 'stop-sigterm' timed out. Killing.
Mar 10 12:39:04 az-lnxu24-21 systemd[1]: teamcity-agent.service: Killing process 1842 (java) with signal SIGKILL.
Mar 10 12:39:04 az-lnxu24-21 systemd[1]: teamcity-agent.service: Killing process 2099 (java) with signal SIGKILL.

Cause

The OS was triggering auto-updates on system components, and that was ultimately sending SIGTERM to the TeamCity build agent service.

Resolution

Disable auto-updates in the OS.

Additional information (optional)

In the case of the issue persisting after disabling automatic updates, the following can also be checked:

Overhead from Unused Plugins;
Java Memory Configuration: The default heap size (-Xmx) in the agent's JVM might not be optimized for available resources, leading to potential memory management issues: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/teamcity/configuring-build-agent-startup-properties.html#Agent+Properties