Neo4j won't start on AWS instance

I have an AWS instance (t1.micro in us-west AZ) running Ubuntu 14.04 with neo4j-enterprise 2.2.3 installed.

I can start the service with an empty database without any problem, but when I try to start it with a database with a small amount (~ 200mb) of data (by changing the datastore directory in conf / neo4j-server.properties), I get

Failed to start within 120 seconds. 
Neo4j Server may have failed to start, please check the logs.

      

        
        
        
      

    

What is frustrating when I look in /data/log/console.log, all I get is this:

2015-07-20 20:33:43.769+0000 INFO  [API] Setting startup timeout to: 120000ms based on 120000
2015-07-20 20:33:44.527+0000 INFO  [API] Successfully shutdown Neo4j Server.

      

        
        
        
      

    

and in neo4j.0.0.log:

Jul 20, 2015 5:26:05 PM com.sun.jersey.server.impl.application.WebApplicationImpl _initiate
INFO: Initiating Jersey application, version 'Jersey: 1.19 02/11/2015 03:25 AM'

      

        
        
        
      

    

... that is, nothing useful.

In / dbDirectory / messages.log I have

2015-07-20 17:40:37.926+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Thread[main,5,main] Starting BatchInserter(EmbeddedBatchInserter[/var/lib/neo4j/data/civ_sm.db])
2015-07-20 17:40:37.946+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Creating new db @ /var/lib/neo4j/data/my.db/neostore
2015-07-20 17:40:38.251+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: No lucene scan store index found, this might just be first use. Preparing to rebuild.
2015-07-20 17:40:38.278+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: No lucene scan store index found, this might just be first use. Preparing to rebuild.
2015-07-20 17:40:38.403+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Rebuilding lucene scan store, this may take a while
2015-07-20 17:40:38.404+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Lucene scan store rebuilt (roughly -1 nodes)
2015-07-20 17:41:04.646+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Missing counts store, rebuilding it.
2015-07-20 17:41:07.377+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: About to rotate counts store at transaction 1 to [/var/lib/neo4j/data/my.db/neostore.counts.db.b], from [/var/lib/neo4j/data/my.db/neostore.counts.db.a].
2015-07-20 17:41:07.382+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Successfully rotated counts store at transaction 1 to [/var/lib/neo4j/data/my.db/neostore.counts.db.b], from [/var/lib/neo4j/data/my.db/neostore.counts.db.a].
2015-07-20 17:41:07.606+0000 INFO  [org.neo4j]: Thread[main,5,main] Clean shutdown on BatchInserter(EmbeddedBatchInserter[/var/lib/neo4j/data/my.db])

      

        
        
        
      

    

(I wrote a small program that generated data in this DB using BatchInserter

, and the contents of this log all seem to be related to the creation process. There is nothing related to a failed startup.)

Trying to isolate the problem, I downloaded the database to my local machine (running Fedora and the same version (2.2.3) of neo4j) and it started with no problem.

Two other notes: I set max-open files to 40k (although this shouldn't be a problem given the limited db size) and it crashes after ~ 2 seconds