Tomcat: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 2. Configuring Tomcat

Once Tomcat is up and running, you will want to keep an eye on it to help it along occasionally. Troubleshooting application servers can be intimidating. In this chapter, we show you the various places to look for information about your server, how to find out why things aren’t working, and give some examples of common mistakes in setting up and configuring Tomcat. We round out this chapter with some ideas on performance tuning the underlying Java runtime environment and the Tomcat server itself. Finally, we discuss the Tomcat administration web application, a tool for helping you with the task of keeping Tomcat running.

Using the Apache Web Server

You can use Tomcat as a standalone web server and servlet container, or you can use it as an add-on servlet container for a separate web server. Both are common, and each is appropriate in certain situations.

The Tomcat authors have spent quite a bit of time and effort to make Tomcat run efficiently as a standalone web server; as a result, it is easy to set up and run a web site without worrying about connecting Tomcat to a third-party web server. Tomcat’s built-in web server is a highly efficient HTTP 1.1 server that is quite fast at serving static content once it is configured correctly for the computer on which it runs. They’ve also added features to Tomcat that one would expect from full-featured web servers, such as Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripting, a Server-Side Includes (SSI) dynamic page interpreter, ...