so the unspoken thing seems to be that they kept the same JVM arguments as java 7 and that caused problems in java 8? and they had a JVM argument that was setting a value to the same as the default?
An unfortunate thing about using non-default JVM settings is that you need to scrutinize them every time you switch Java versions. If I ever go through this again, I will know to pay more attention to every JVM setting we override.