I finished the switchover. In addition to moving VPS, I moved off of Resin and onto Tomcat. After dealing with some stuff in Tomcat, I wonder if Resin isn't better suited. Tomcat is really fussy/picky sometimes. More so on Windows than Linux. However, this whole ordeal was a great learning experience.

When I installed on CentOS, I just did a basic 'yum install tomcat5*' and it installed everything. This is where I ran into problems. Nothing was working correctly. I made a decision to get rid of it ('yum remove tomcat5*') and set it up manually myself.

The key thing to remember with tomcat, once you have it up and running is that you're going to want to make a environmental setting file called 'setenv.sh' - The {tomcat install dir}/bin/catalina.sh automatically looks for this file in the same directory.  This 'setenv.sh' file is responsible for telling tomcat where the JRE_HOME is located and other JVM memory options.

I have a couple of things to lock down, but I will be writing up a CentOS/Tomcat/Railo guide. Not that we need another one as they're pretty much the same instructions listed here along with the same resource links that I listed there as well. However, I threw one more thing into the mix. When I was at CFUnited, I managed to score a copy of Fusion Reactor. David Tattersall and crew was there next to the Railo booth and I watched / listened and pestered. I'm also going to get a twitter/plurk friend of mine get involved to get her thoughts on Fusion Reactor as well because I believe that a CF/Server Admin that can herd turkeys and servers for a living has to have some thoughts on Fusion Reactor.

David Low wrote on 10/18/09 12:00 PM

After a long time using Tomcat on managed hosting, I would go back to Resin tomorrow if possible. Tomcat is fussy, it crashes for next to nothing and just doesn't seem that stable to me.

This is Tomcat 5.5 we're talking about, maybe the upgrade to 6 might help but it's not an option for us at present. Resin will be the next stop.

Paul Kukiel wrote on 11/03/09 4:15 PM

Nothing wrong with resin. I have multiple site's running in resin its been great and it's easy to get going aswell.

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