[TriLUG] tomcat questions

Owen Berry oberry at trilug.org
Fri Feb 3 10:32:46 EST 2006


On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 10:59:36PM -0500, Steven Blanchard wrote:
> I am trying set up a development environment for tomcat5 on my
> debian/sid laptop.  Tomcat start times and initial servlet loads are
> painfully slow.  Is this a problem with my setup, or business as
> usual?

Unfortunately there's not much good news on this side - Java is big and
memory intensive, and so is Tomcat. Seems to run well once it's loaded,
but it is resource intensive to startup, and remains a memory hog once
it's running.

> Currently, tomcat is using kaffe for it's JVM.  Is there a better JVM
> which I could use?  I can not use an official Sun JVM, as this is a
> powerbook.

It's a pity you can't use the Sun JVM. I've tested Sun's against IBM's
for Tomcat startup time on an x86, and Tomcat took about 3 times longer
to startup under IBM's JVM compared to Sun's. Of course, that may not be
true on all platforms.

> Additionally, does anyone have any tips for reloading servlets so I do
> not have to restart tomcat (a 5+ minute ordeal on a 1GHz+1GB tibook).

You should be able to setup Tomcat to auto-reload servlets if they
change. Look at the reloadable attribute in the context container
(http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.0-doc/config/context.html). I
haven't done Tomcat development for a while, so this could be the wrong
section, but I'm pretty sure it's there somewhere.

Good luck!
Owen



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