Tomcat Start - Help guide for Tomcat Restart

Even the ideal application server will sometimes need to be restarted. And so it is with Apache Tomcat. The aim of this article is to provide a simple Apache Tomcat start guide, so that if you awakened at 3am by the sound of a telephone ring from your company’s CXO you will have no trouble restarting Apache Tomcat.

 

The first thing that you need to know is that while there are some general steps to follow, because all circumstances are different restarting your apache Tomcat instance is not an exact science. Why? There can be many reasons (and the reasons depend on the platform), but essentially even after you shut down Tomcat, the processes may continue to run and hold onto the ports. This can cause following starts to fail.

 

The nuclear option is kill -9 and analogous to the well-known CTRL-C in Windows.
The benefit is that this will offer you help starting your Apache Tomcat server. The downside is that you can ultimately cause your web app persisted data to find itself in an unstable state.

 

Before you try the nuclear option you should try developing a solid shell init script to take care of properly shutting down and restarting Tomcat. The returns are great. Our in-house Tomcat expert Jason Brittain, author of the enormous Tomcat resource Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, has spent several years developing a solid init script, which is bundled with Tcat Server.