Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Java VM Configuration

How Tomcat will run depends in part on how you configure the Java virtual machine in which it runs. For example, if you do not configure the JVM to be able to use up to a specified amount of heap memory, it will use only up to the default amount of memory, which may not be enough for the web application you're trying to run. If Tomcat does not have sufficient memory to run your webapp on startup, it will just serve error pages to all web clients. If Tomcat has enough memory to start your webapp but not enough to process as many concurrent requests as you configured your connector to allow into Tomcat, some or all of the requests will get an error response or a dropped connection.

There is a plethora of JVM startup switch settings that you may set. See Table 2-1 for the settings we chose as some of the most useful JVM startup switch settings you can use when running Tomcat.

Table 2-1. Java VM configuration options

Use	JVM option	Meaning
[a]
[b]
Memory setting	-Xms384M	Sets the heap memory size at JVM startup time.
Memory setting	-Xmx384M	Sets the maximum heap memory size the JVM can expand to.
Debugging security	-Djava.security.debug=all	Turns on all debug output for security.[a]
Debugging	-enableassertions	Enables assertion checking.[b]
Debugging	-verbose:class	Enables verbose class loading debug output.
Debugging	-verbose:gc	Enables verbose garbage collection debug output.
Graphical	-Djava.awt.headless=true	Allows the JVM to run without ...