Making your THREDDS Data Server more robust

[rsignell]

There are a few things to check if your THREDDS Data Server is acting
flaky:

1) Have you blocked web crawlers? Something like this should work:
$ cd <tomcat>/webapps/ROOT
$ cat robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

2) Have you specified headless server (for systems where X is not
installed) and max memory for Tomcat?
For a 32 bit server, try adding this line at the beginning of <tomcat>/
bin/catalina.sh
JAVA_OPTS="-server -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xms512m -Xmx1024m"

For a 64 bit server with more memory, you could put the max higher
JAVA_OPTS="-server -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xms512m -Xmx2048m"

3) Get the latest THREDDS Data Server distribution from:
ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/thredds/4.0/thredds.war
and redeploy. Several aggregation bugs that have plagued us for
months were just fixed last weekend.

Keep in mind that I'm not a Tomcat expert, so if others want to weigh
in on these suggestions or provide more info, please feel free!

-Rich

[David Stuebe]

Those settings are critical for basic functionality and should
probably be added to the unidata installation instructions posted
here:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/tech/tutorial/index.html

There is already a discussion of the JAVA_OPTS included.

These directions also discuss other important settings for security
and access to the TDS admin page which is very important for
debugging. It provides web access to the TDS log files and is very
helpful in setting up FMRC and other complex features.

I think we should try and centralize our tips and suggestions on
setting up TDS using these tutorials

David