Getting Apache Tomcat to reflect changes immediately

I installed apache tomcat 6 on my server and created my first index page in the ROOT folder and everything worked perfectly. But as soon as I started to attempt to tweek the page to make it look how I wanted it to I noticed that the changes where not being reflected in the borwser and the old page continues to be displayed. Does anyone know why it does this and how it can be fixed so I can see changes immediately?

asked by ts8550

There are a number of settings which may apply to your situation.

If the file you are editing is a small 'static' file, Tomcat may be caching it in memory. The attribute values of the Context element which govern this are: cacheMaxSize, cacheObjectMaxSize, cacheTTL and cachingAllowed.

You can find more details about their values in the Tomcat Documentation at: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/context.html

If the resource you are editing is a JSP file, then you should check to see if the attributes of org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet in apache-tomcat-6.x/conf/web.xml have been adjusted - it's usual to disable attributes associated with file recompilation during development, before placing the server into production.

Each attribute is well documented in the configuration file, it's worth reading the whole of the standard web.xml to understand more about how Tomcat works.