It turns out that table xwikistatsvisit contains too many items, and the size is over 3GB. Therefore the initialization was unable to complete before tomcat timing out. And I suspect the XWiki instance had been through automatic testing for years, and each time of testing access will generate a record in this table.
I resolved the issue by deleting all records in the table before starting tomcat. However, the SQL delete command took over two hours to complete on a medium testing virtual machine with SSD, 4 CPUs of Intel i9 and 8GB of RAM, running MariaDB v10.9.2. Also, the hypervisor needs to enable “PAE/NX” and “Nested Vt-x/ADM-V” for higher performance; otherwise, the computing task will get stuck forever.
I am still open to suggestions about how to handle this situation better.