Improving the IdP's startup time on tomcat

[IAM David Bantz]

Using the same Catalina logs Andy referred to as a measure, I see variation
in the history of start-up times, but
Shibb IdP 4.3.1 in Tomcat  9 on RHEL 7.6 VM  startup times generally ~20 0
30 seconds

David St Pierre Bantz
U Alaska

On Oct 19, 2023 at 00:50:26, Max Spicer via users <users at shibboleth.net>
wrote:

> 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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