Tomcat Tuning and Troubleshooting

This section includes some tips, tuning, and troubleshooting techniques of Tomcat.

Startup and Deployment Time

The following tuning could dramatically reduce tomcat startup and WebApp deployment times.

Deploy Apps in Parallel

Apps in Tomcat are deployed sequntally by default, since the deployment is managed by a thread pool named Start-Stop threads. The number of threads in this pool is 1 by default.

The recommended settings is to be the same number of as the number of processors on the host server, to ensure actual parallelization.

To change the number of threads of this pool:

In TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml Add startStopThreads="0" to <Host tag, this will create a thread per processor to handle parallel deployments, by default the value is 1 thread.

The Host tag should looks for something like this.

<Host name="localhost"  appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" startStopThreads="0">

Jars Scanning

By default, Tomcat scans every class in every jar for annotations, web-fragments, and TLD’s, this could increase the startup and deployment times. There are many options to workaround this behavior, the most convenient (in my opinion) is as follows:

In TOMCAT_HOME/conf/catalina.properties:

  1. Add *.jar to tomcat.util.scan.StandardJarScanFilter.jarsToSkip property, this will make Tomcat ignore all the jars by default from initial scanning.

  2. Set the needed jars to be scanned in tomcat.util.scan.StandardJarScanFilter.jarsToScan property, in our case, we to ensure that we just scan the following jars. j-framework-web*.jar, primefaces*.jar,jsf*.jar, jersey-container*.jar, spring-web*.jar, spring-security-web*.jar

The catalina.properties should looks like this:

tomcat.util.scan.StandardJarScanFilter.jarsToSkip=*.jar

tomcat.util.scan.StandardJarScanFilter.jarsToScan=\
j-framework-web*.jar, \
primefaces*.jar,\
jsf*.jar, \
jersey-container*.jar, \
jar,spring-web*.jar, \
spring-security-web*.jar

WebApp Code-Coverage

In this section, we will show you the required steps to verify which backend code is being called by the front-end during the manual or automated testing.

This tutorial is applied to Java Web Applications deployed on Tomcat, however, it could be also applied to any Java based application deployed as Standalone or as a Docker container.

Prerequisites

  1. Java Development Kit.

  2. Apache tomcat.

  3. Java Code Coverage library and agent (JACOCO).

Steps

  1. Create “test” folder inside your Apache-tomcat home, and as shown below, place the following jars inside it:

    1. jacocoagent.jar

    2. jacocoant.jar

    3. jacococli.jar

    jacoco files

  2. In the “test” folder, create “to-html.bat” file that, which contains the following script:
    java -jar jacococli.jar report test.exec --classfiles ../webapps/app/WEB-INF/classes --html html

  3. In Apache-tomcat home “bin” folder, create setenv.bat with the following contents:
    SET CATALINA_OPTS=-javaagent:../test/jacocoagent.jar=destfile=../test.sexec,includes=com.app.*,append=false

  4. Start the tomcat with startup.bat script inside the bin folder.

  5. Deploy your app on tomcat by placing the war file inside the webapps folder(app.war for example).

  6. Run the tests on your app either manually or automatically using something like Selenium.

    app screen

  7. When done, shutdown the tomcat using bin/shutdown.bat batch inside tomcat.

  8. Inside tomcat/test double click on to-html.bat file, then an html folder will be created.

  9. Run index.html and you will be able to see the something like the following results:

jacoco results
jacoco results
jacoco results

Profiling using JVisualVM

Below the steps required to profile Tomcat at runtime.

  1. Add the following to sentenv.bat if windows and setenv.sh in Unix file in TOMCAT_HOME/bin

SET CATALINA_OPTS= %CATALINA_OPTS%
		-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote
		-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=8888
		-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false
		-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false

In windows, the above should be in the same line, in Unix, you can add forward slash \ at the end of each line

  1. Open JDK_HOME/bin/JVisualVM (assuming Oracle JDK)

  2. Add JMX connection and fill the host field 127.0.0.1:8888 (assuming that you are locally troubleshooting Tomcat)

  3. Connect.

You should see something like this:

visualvm

The above shall be used carefully due to performance and security concerns, authentication and SSL should be added as needed.