Mysterious Oracle OPatch Process Running Upon Startup or Shutdown of Weblogic Server

Upon startup or shutdown of a Weblogic process you may see an additional OPatch process spawn - it might look something like this:

6680  5909 /u01/oracle/domains/devtwo/bin/stopWebLogic.sh
6727  6680 /u01/oracle/fmwhome/Oracle_Home/OPatch/opatch lsinventory -retry 0

Notice that the parent PID of the OPatch process is the stopWeblogic process.

By default, Weblogic 12c will opt to display a list of the patches applied to this Oracle Home in the log. Hence the OPatch process spawning upon startup or shutdown.

To turn this off you must set this in your JAVA_OPTIONS:

-Dweblogic.log.DisplayPatchInfo=false

We have tested to see if the flag being set to false would impact any startup or shutdown times and it appears that the difference (if any) was unnoticeable.