Running Tomcat with Java Server Option

To improve performance (most of the time) for Tomcat (and most any other java application server), the server can be run with the Java option "-server", which optimizes performance at startup, and can increase start up time quite a bit in some instances, but typically increases performance under normal use.

This can be set anywhere that you set JVM options, but for Tomcat, I set these options in the tomcat user (tcsh) profile as such:

setenv CATALINA_OPTS "-server -Xms128m -Xmx128m -XX:NewSize=48m -verbose:gc"

in Solaris 10, this setting can be verified by running 'pargs' on the PID, like so:

% pargs 28145
28145:  /usr/jdk/java/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderL
argv[0]: /usr/jdk/java/bin/java
argv[1]: -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager
argv[2]: -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/u01/app/tomcat/conf/logging.properties
argv[3]: -server
argv[4]: -Xms128m
argv[5]: -Xmx128m
argv[6]: -XX:NewSize=48m
argv[7]: -verbose:gc
argv[8]: -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/u01/app/tomcat/common/endorsed
argv[9]: -classpath
argv[10]: :/u01/app/tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/u01/app/tomcat/bin/commons-logging-api.jar
argv[11]: -Dcatalina.base=/u01/app/tomcat
argv[12]: -Dcatalina.home=/u01/app/tomcat
argv[13]: -Djava.io.tmpdir=/u01/app/tomcat/temp
argv[14]: org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap
argv[15]: start