Production Weekly Rolling Tomcat Restarts

[David Langenberg]

On Feb 26, 2013, at 1:21 PM, David Gersic <dgersic at niu.edu> wrote:

>>>> On 2/26/2013 at 01:14 PM, "Royder, Kyle D" <kroyder at austin.utexas.edu> wrote: 
>> shib users:
>> 
>>  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.
> 
> Likely it was a workaround for a problem, probably one that has long since been resolved.

Agreed, long ago there was something in ours that was leaking memory, but that's been fixed for years.

> 
> 
>> Is it normal or recommended for a high traffic IdP tomcat instance 
>> to be restarted regularly
> 
> I'm going with "no" here. I don't restart mine unless there's a problem requiring it, and then I work to ensure that whatever the problem was that it gets resolved and stays resolved so that I don't have to do it again.

Only reason we restart ours is for system patches or due to config changes that we haven't yet setup to auto-apply.

Dave