topic Alfresco loading very slowly in Tomcat in Alfresco Archive

Alfresco loading very slowly in Tomcat

stefan776 — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:11:07 GMT

Hi,I am experiencing severe problems in getting Alfreso to run on Tomcat in a CentOS VM. Tomcat will take about 45 mins to load Alfresco, during this time the whole server becomes very unresponsive (command line lag etc) and even once the app is up and running it is almost unusable due to sluggish p

Re: Alfresco loading very slowly in Tomcat

derek — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 21:59:34 GMT

Take a JStack of the server while the alfresco.war is starting.
jps
jstack <pid>

Cut out all the threads that are just sitting around and identify which threads are busy and find out what they are doing. There are some crazy waits in there where I would not expect any time to be taken, so perhaps it's doing something silly like generating DEBUG log messages before throwing them away (normally only a problem with incorrect JBoss settings).

I scanned the config and details and couldn't find anything that looks odd - if anything that machine should be starting up in 30s tops!

Re: Alfresco loading very slowly in Tomcat

stefan776 — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:06:34 GMT

Thanks Derek.
I did some remote profiling via JMX, JVisualVM and JConsole during startup of Tomcat/Alfresco and couldn't find anything in the output that would hint at the problem.
Since then we moved Alfresco to a different virtual machine of a similar build and its working there without problems. The average startup time is now 30 seconds and the web client is very fast to respond.
So in conclusion I am ruling this out to be a problem with Java or Alfresco.
Our server admins are having a look at both VMs right now, if they get to the bottom of it then I will give an update here.

Re: Alfresco loading very slowly in Tomcat

stefan776 — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:33:10 GMT

Just a quick follow-up - our sysadmins got to the bottom of it and fixed it. It all boiled down to the misconfiguration of a single VM setting.
From their feedback:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1003470
for the VM, go to Edit / Resources Tab / Memory and make sure Resource Allocation “unlimited” box is checked (on).

Flipping this "unlimited" switch to ON resolved all our performance troubles with Java/Tomcat/Alfresco. The start-up time for Tomcat6 with Alfresco deployed is on average 30 seconds now.