Tomcat server hangs on RedHat systems - a possible solution

["Kevin O'Brien" <Kevin.M.O'Brien@xxxxxxxx>]

If you are running LAS on a RedHat system, and you are fed up with the tomcat server because you have to constantly restart it, there may be a simple solution.

We have had extensive problems with the Tomcat server hanging on our RedHat 9 systems.  It didn't seem to matter which version of the tomcat 5 server we were using - we saw consistent hangs with all of them.  Searching through the web, I ran across some documentation that described the problem.  It turns out that RH 9 uses a new form of threading, which apparently was incompatible with the tomcat 5 servers.   To stop the tomcat server from hanging, it is necessary to revert to an older form of threading.

To do this, insert the following into the tomcat/bin/catalina.sh file:

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL

And restart the tomcat server.  We've done this here at PMEL and haven't had to restart the tomcat server in two weeks.

The documentation indicates that this is only effective for RH9 systems, but I haven't been able to verify that because we only have RH9 systems.

This is also documented in our  FAQ-O-Matic documentation at

    http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/LASdoc?auth=ckca0339544dae0aa26a0e690396b7d40a&file=65

Kevin


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Kevin O'Brien                   UW/JISAO	
Research Scientist              NOAA/PMEL/TMAP
206-526-6751                    http://tmap.pmel.noaa.gov