Production Server¶

Tomcat¶

We use the following settings for Tomcat on our production server (NixOS/Linux):

-Xms350m 
-Xss8m 
-Xmx8G 
-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom 
-XX:MaxPermSize=512M 
-XX:PermSize=512M 
-XX:-UseGCOverheadLimit 
-XX:+UseCompressedOops
-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError 
-XX:HeapDumpPath=/var/tomcat/logs/heapdump.hprof

Details¶

-Xmx8G

The most important setting, maximum heap space, value depends on size/number of applications, but the default setting is usually too low. If this setting is too high for your JVM, it won't start at all.

-XX:MaxPermSize=512M

This allows redeploying the application without running into permgenspace errors too quickly.

-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom

The default implementation for random can be too slow (java.util.UUID.randomUUID is used for entity identifiers, including RequestLogEntry) see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/137212/how-to-solve-performance-problem-with-java-securerandom

Monitoring and Debugging¶

Use jvisualvm to inspect the Tomcat process, this allows you to look at the heap and running threads and create dumps for later inspection. A heap dump can also be created using:

jmap -F -dump:format=b,file=<filename> <process id>

The Eclipse Memory Analyzer can be used to inspect this file, get it from http://www.eclipse.org/mat/

If the tomcat process becomes unresponsive try

kill -3 <process id>

to generate a thread dump in the catalina.out log.

MySQL¶

See the MySQL page.

Lightweight VPS¶

See the Lightweight VPS page, it also contains a step-by-step installation guide.