托管一个以上基于tomcat的Web应用程序时的最佳实践是什么

Question

I do understand that using the same tomcat instance for a number of web applications has some risks (eg if one web application crashes tomcat it will terminate the other web applications as well.). The benefit is of course cost effectiveness since one server is enough and having all the web applications in one place makes it very easy to administrate.

Are there any industry guidelines on how a good setup with multiple web applications on tomcat should look like?

Answer 1

Pros

• One JVM to monitor
• Common libraries can be shared (sometimes risky)

Cons

• Common HTTP thread pool all applications are using (you can, however, configure several connectors with different thread pools)
• One malfunctioning application can take down the whole server
• Restarting one application requires restarting all of them (if not using hot-deployment)

Answer 2

You are right that hosting of multiple we applications on one application server / web container (either Tomcat or other) has benefits.

You mentioned the robustness issue when one application may cause failure of another. But let's simplify this: even if you have only one application you still want 24*7 availability. To achieve this goal people typically run more than one instance of application server with identical application on each one and load balancer in the enterence to the site. The same is relevant for several web applications. Just run N (2 as minimum) application servers with identical set of web applications deployed and load balancer. You will probably need a kind of watchdog that restarts server if it failed or if it stopped responding etc.

In some cases kind of clustering is required. But it is other story.