Please provide the following information. The more we know about your system and use case, the more easily and likely we can help.

Description of the problem / feature request / question:

We're running Bazel in our CI environment (Prow, which runs Bazel inside Docker on GKE). Starting with Bazel 0.7.0, we noticed Bazel occasionally crashing during startup, and it seems to continue with Bazel 0.8.1.

Using --batch seems to mitigate the issue, but we make several successive Bazel calls, so would like to avoid its usage if possible.

If possible, provide a minimal example to reproduce the problem:

No great repro steps yet. There were two recent failures after we upgraded to Bazel 0.8.1 and reverted the --batch mitigation:
https://k8s-gubernator.appspot.com/build/kubernetes-jenkins/pr-logs/pull/57221/pull-kubernetes-bazel-build/20714/
https://k8s-gubernator.appspot.com/build/kubernetes-jenkins/pr-logs/pull/57221/pull-kubernetes-bazel-test/22094/

In both cases, we were just running bazel version, but it crashed:

W1215 22:29:00.731] Run: ('bazel', 'version')
W1215 22:29:03.479] INFO: $TEST_TMPDIR defined: output root default is '/root/.cache/bazel'.
W1215 22:29:03.482] Extracting Bazel installation...
W1215 22:29:46.215] .
W1215 22:29:46.215] Server crashed during startup. Now printing '/root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/e9f728bbd90b3fba632eb31b20e1dacd/server/jvm.out':

(nothing was printed from jvm.out)

Environment info

• Operating System: Linux / Docker / GKE

• Bazel version (output of bazel info release):
  release 0.8.1

• If bazel info release returns "development version" or "(@Non-Git)", please tell us what source tree you compiled Bazel from; git commit hash is appreciated (git rev-parse HEAD):

Have you found anything relevant by searching the web?

#3956 and #4267 look somewhat related.

Anything else, information or logs or outputs that would be helpful?

(If they are large, please upload as attachment or provide link).