Add documentation about JAVA_OPTS defined in /etc/init.d/tomcat6 not propagating to startup

[Reuben Firmin]

Binary package hint: tomcat6

I have not fully investigated. However, I added the line:

JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Xmx4096m -Xms1024m -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:NewSize=128m -Dri.home=/home/reubenf/code/depend"

to /etc/init.d/tomcat6. The ri.home variable was not available to my webapp after a tomcat restart.

I then added the same line to /var/share/tomcat6/bin/catalina.sh. Two things happened:

1) The server failed to start because I have only 4GBs of RAM, and thus max heap was too large. (Adjusted in catalina.sh and all was well.)

2) Once I fixed the max heap, ri.home was available to my webapp.

Thus for some reason JAVA_OPTs is not being passed between the scripts properly. You should also define a spot in /etc/init.d/tomcat6 for developers to add their own JAVA_OPTs, to minimize hackery.

[Joshua Daniel Franklin (joshuadfranklin)]

Reuben, it's not obvious in the init script but the proper place is /etc/default/tomcat6 which includes a JAVA_OPT line, which actually clobber the one in the init script due to the "if -z JAVA_OPT". This actually bit me recently due to a tomcat update.

[Thierry Carrez (ttx)]

Yes, like Joshua said, you shouldn't change the init script, but rather use /etc/default/tomcat6 to influence it.

[Reuben Firmin (reubenf)]

This needs to be documented in /etc/init.d/tomcat.

It's a non-standard location given that many developers will be used to working with the RHEL packages, or directly installing from the tarball.

[Reuben Firmin (reubenf)]

Thanks.