JAVA_OPTS vs. CATALINA_OPTS

[Peter Matthew Eichman]

Hello all,

When running Fedora 4 on Tomcat, is there any difference between setting system properties via CATALINA_OPTS vs. JAVA_OPTS? We have been using CATALINA_OPTS on our systems, but I notice that all of the Fedora documentation uses JAVA_OPTS instead. Is that just to be servlet-container agnostic, or are there other benefits to using JAVA_OPTS?

Thanks,

-Peter

[Esmé Cowles]

Peter-

Tomcat's catalina.sh says:

# CATALINA_OPTS (Optional) Java runtime options used when the "start",
# "run" or "debug" command is executed.
# Include here and not in JAVA_OPTS all options, that should
# only be used by Tomcat itself, not by the stop process,
# the version command etc.
# Examples are heap size, GC logging, JMX ports etc.

# JAVA_OPTS (Optional) Java runtime options used when any command
# is executed.
# Include here and not in CATALINA_OPTS all options, that
# should be used by Tomcat and also by the stop process,
# the version command etc.
# Most options should go into CATALINA_OPTS.

Based on that, I'd say using CATALINA_OPTS is probably the better practice for options related to starting Tomcat, but either should work most of the time. There are probably other Java tools that look for JAVA_OPTS (e.g., Maven might do this), so there might be some cases where JAVA_OPTS works but CATALINA_OPTS would only work for Tomcat.

-Esmé

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[Peter Matthew Eichman]

Thanks Esmé. Given that, we will stick with using CATALINA_OPTS for our config until we encounter problems.

-Peter