Improving the IdP's startup time on tomcat

[Max Spicer]

Hi Andy,

Wow, 12 seconds! I was pretty pleased with 30 given our current timings.
That definitely gives us something to aim for - thanks for the info. I
wonder what startup times others see?

We do already use MDQ for federated metadata but it's possible we could do
more with some of our file-backed http metadata providers.

Moving off tomcat is also on the distant horizon but we are unfortunately
wedded to this for now due to external factors.

Regards,

Max

On Wed, 18 Oct 2023 at 16:25, Morgan, Andrew J <morgan at oregonstate.edu>
wrote:

> Hi Max,
>
> We run IDP v4.3.0 on Debian's tomcat9 package on a VM.  Nothing special.
> Startup time is about 12s:
>
>   Deployment of deployment descriptor
> [/etc/tomcat9/Catalina/localhost/idp.xml] has finished in [11,358] ms
>
> I remember there was a huge difference in startup time when we switched to
> use the MetaData Query protocol (MDQ) instead of loading the full InCommon
> (eduGain) metadata.  If you have a large metadata feed, that might the main
> reason for the slow start.
>
> Thanks,
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* users <users-bounces at shibboleth.net> on behalf of Max Spicer via
> users <users at shibboleth.net>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, October 18, 2023 8:04 AM
> *To:* Shib Users <users at shibboleth.net>
> *Cc:* Max Spicer <max.spicer at york.ac.uk>
> *Subject:* Improving the IdP's startup time on tomcat
>
>
> [This email originated from outside of OSU. Use caution with links and
> attachments.]
> I've been looking to improve the startup time of our IdP as on tomcat it
> was taking around 4 minutes 30 seconds.
> https://shibboleth.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IDP5/pages/3199511039/Troubleshooting
> is very useful and the advice to run with unpacked wars immediately takes
> the startup time down to around 40 seconds on tomcat9.
>
> I've also looked at
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/TOMCAT/HowTo+FasterStartUp.
> This suggests setting metadata-complete="true" in web.xml and adding an
> empty <absolute-ordering /> element. This takes almost another 10 seconds
> off the time.
>
> These last changes stop Tomcat from scanning the web application and its
> libraries for classes that use annotations to define components of a web
> application (Servlets etc.). If there is a SCI with a @HandlesTypes
> annotation it also means it will not scan for classes that use annotations
> or interfaces specified in that annotation.
>
> Can anyone confirm whether this is a safe thing to do with the IdP
> application?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Max Spicer
>
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