How do you gracefully restart Tomcat? It will be good to have a standard way doing this. We created a health check url for the load balancer (e.g. /health). This url returns 200 status to indicate this service is up. There is a prob.txt under tomcat dir. If we delete this file, the health check will start returning 404. Thus, remove this box from load balancer. Wait for 2 to 3 mins before shutting it down the process to ensure all request have been processed.

asked by mcheung610

Tomcat, unlike Apache HTTPD, does not have a graceful restart function, largely because of the consequences of it being an application server rather than a web server.

The restart time for server itself largely depends on how long it takes your application to start up, you should be able to start a fresh Tomcat instance in a few seconds - it's worth noting how long it takes to start up on your system, before you customise the configuration.

Instead of restarting the server, you can restart individual applications, which is nearer to the concept of a graceful restart and wouldn't incur the overhead of restarting all of the applications.

An appropriately secured* Manager application instance in each Host, will enable you to selectively restart an application. Automated requests can be sent to the /manager/text component using the same request structure as the /manager/html component, but with smaller output.

* The Manager application should be secured by adding the RemoteIpValve to it's Context definition, with only the specific IP addresses you'll administer the server from enabled.

answered by pidster on June 16, 2011 11:46 AM

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