Tomcat 8 versus Tomcat 7

[Jeffrey A Trimble]

Would anyone like to share their experience using Tomcat 8 with Dspace 5.X or Dspace 6.X?  I’m looking at using Tomcat 8 simply because it uses Java 7 — how convenient — and I don’t have to monkey around with the Tomcat settings.

Thanks,

Jeffrey Trimble, MLS

William F. Maag Library

Youngstown State University

330.941.2483 (Office)

jatr...@ysu.edu

http://www.maag.ysu.edu

http://digital.maag.ysu.edu

[Alan Orth]

First, whatever you do, make sure you're using the Java 8 JDK, because
Solr developers recommend it for Solr 4.x and 5.x[0]. As for the
Tomcat version, we run with Tomcat 7, but only because there were
early issues with Tomcat 8 on DSpace 5.x[1], though those might have
been fixed by now (search the Jira). Lastly, Tomcat 8.0.x was
superseded by Tomcat 8.5 by the Tomcat project[2], so if you're going
to pick a Tomcat 8 to run on, I'd try to make it 8.5.x. Ubuntu 16.04
(a long-term support release) ships 8.0.x for some reason, even though
upstream support was supposed to end in September, 2016!

Cheers,

[0] https://wiki.apache.org/solr/ShawnHeisey
[1] https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DS-3092
[2] https://tomcat.apache.org/

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[Jeffrey A Trimble]

Thanks Alan.

We’re not going to be able to upgrade to Java 8 because IBM hasn’t
delivered a JDK 8.X for AIX 7.1 (Yes, we’re running our DSpace production
AIX).
We’ll have to look at this more closely.

Thanks,

Jeff

Jeffrey Trimble, MLS
William F. Maag Library
Youngstown State University
330.941.2483 (Office)
jatr...@ysu.edu
http://www.maag.ysu.edu
http://digital.maag.ysu.edu

[Alan Orth]

Wow, you *you're* the one in the recent DSpace deployment survey who
said they were using IBM's JDK! Let me just leave you this note from
the Solr developers about IBM's JDK:

---
It's not a good idea to use a JVM from IBM. IBM aggressively enables a
large number of performance optimizations by default, which helps a
lot with performance, but some of those optimizations cause
Solr/Lucene to encounter bugs.

―https://wiki.apache.org/solr/ShawnHeisey
---

Best of luck,

[Jeffrey A Trimble]

I see IBM just delivered SDK 8.0 for 64-bit architecture.

―Jeff

Jeffrey Trimble, MLS
William F. Maag Library
Youngstown State University
330.941.2483 (Office)
jatr...@ysu.edu
http://www.maag.ysu.edu
http://digital.maag.ysu.edu

[Mark Wood]

On my development box I'm currently using Tomcat 8.0 with 5x and 6.  We're still on 7.0 in production (5x) but I want to move to 8 when I can find the time.

The only issue I can recall is that Tomcat 8's classloader setup is much more finicky, and that collides with the way I like to deploy webapp.s.  I inject a ready-made database connection pool via JNDI, and if I'm not careful to delete the database driver JAR from each DSpace webapp. then 8 will complain that it can't find the driver (because there's one in Tomcat's own classloader, which supplies the pool, and another in the webapp's classloader, and they aren't the same 'Class'es even though they are loaded from identical files).  I reckon that most sites won't have that problem.  When I have some time, I mean to create an option to leave the database driver JAR out of the webapps during assembly.

[Alan Orth]

Hey, Mark.

Can I revive this side thread? I was just looking into setting up a JNDI database pool for my DSpace webapps but after reading your description above it doesn't sound very straightforward. There's not much guidance on this technique! But nevertheless I'm interested in having my webapps use a common pool of database connections.

Thanks,

On Thu, Dec 8, 2016 at 4:06 PM Mark Wood <mwood...@gmail.com> wrote:

On my development box I'm currently using Tomcat 8.0 with 5x and 6.  We're still on 7.0 in production (5x) but I want to move to 8 when I can find the time.

The only issue I can recall is that Tomcat 8's classloader setup is much more finicky, and that collides with the way I like to deploy webapp.s.  I inject a ready-made database connection pool via JNDI, and if I'm not careful to delete the database driver JAR from each DSpace webapp. then 8 will complain that it can't find the driver (because there's one in Tomcat's own classloader, which supplies the pool, and another in the webapp's classloader, and they aren't the same 'Class'es even though they are loaded from identical files).  I reckon that most sites won't have that problem.  When I have some time, I mean to create an option to leave the database driver JAR out of the webapps during assembly.

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