Production Weekly Rolling Tomcat Restarts

[Peter Schober]

* Royder, Kyle D <kroyder at austin.utexas.edu> [2013-02-26 20:15]:
>   I've inherited a Shibboleth service that includes 3 IdP.  There is
>   a cron job on each machine to restart tomcat automatically once a
>   week, on different days, for each machine.  I can't find any
>   discussion as to why this was setup this way.  Is it normal or
>   recommended for a high traffic IdP tomcat instance to be restarted
>   regularly and I'm just missing something in the
>   Productionalization section on the wiki?

I recall that once in a while the IDP or container (hard to tell,
since that's the only thing we had running inside the container) would
become unresponsive or behaved erratically which was "fixed" by a
restart of the container. I only recall that 2-5 times in several
years of production use and no time was spent trying to reproduce that
in a lab environment.
I'd start by not restarting one of those IdPs and see what happens ;)
Good luck with your new responsibility,
-peter