request for beginner's documentation on start troubleshooting

[Riccardo Cohen <ri...@e5group.fr>]

Hello

I 'm quite new to tomcat and just spent one whole day because tomcat 
8.5.23 was freezing at startup for about 15 minutes !!! on a virtual 
private server on debian (while it used to work perfectly last week).

1) it was really difficult to know where was the problem because after 
15 minutes the application worked perfectly, and there was no particular 
error in the log

2) it was difficult to change the log level, the page 
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.5-doc/setup.html does not mention how 
to change the logging level. The page 
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.5-doc/logging.html seems too complex 
and written for advanced users

3) after setting log FINE I found that Creation of SecureRandom instance 
for session ID generation using [SHA1PRNG] took [580,051] milliseconds. 
Documentation for this problem is far far away in 
https://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/HowTo/FasterStartUp, and this page does 
not tell where to put the Java Option for tomcat

So my suggestions are:

- create a beginer's documentation separate from full feature 
documentation, which is too difficult to read for beginners

- explain some important settings, but not everything, only important 
things like port 8080 in conf/server.xml, environment variables etc.

- explicitely advise people to change 
CATALINA_OPTS=-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/urandom to avoid starting 
hard problems on linux

- explain how to build a very simple jsp application, what is the 
meaning of WEB-INF , META-INF and what to put inside

- explain how deployement works in simple configuration where there is 
one application only.

- add a download sample app that works everywhere with one JSP and one 
Servlet for instance.


thanks.


-- 
Riccardo Cohen
+33 6 09 83 64 49
E5Group
http://www.5flow.com


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@tomcat.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org