Tomcat Support for an Old Web Application
In my experience, people having issues with Tomcat web applications are usually experiencing new issues, from old applications, and are definitely some of the hardest to resolve.
The Issue
Let’s say you work for the Acme Company, and your company hosts a web site based on the open source Apache Tomcat web container. Customers can log in and order Acme products (hopefully Wile E. Coyote has Wi-Fi access) and internally, Acme business applications might use web services provided from the Acme web application.
Things have been running smooth for more than a year. Minus a few errors here and there, the site has been running exceptionally well for a long time. But then BAM! Suddenly, one day, your web application experiences a major issue. The web site is too slow. Users are not able to log in anymore. Or maybe the site goes down every so often and requires a reboot.
Whatever the problem is, surely Acme’s CEO, CIO, and any other business partners, are barking fire and demanding that someone resolve the issue quickly and promptly.
New issues on old applications are difficult because…
- First of all, the original developers of the application may no longer be available as a resource. They might have moved to a new department, or maybe even departed the company. This would mean that new individuals have a learning curve to climb before they can intelligently try to diagnose the issue.
- Because the server ran smoothly for so long, many of the issues that you finally do encounter may be intermittent and hard to reproduce. The underlying reason is typically embedded in some sort of long-term data, or load-based cause that escaped your company’s load testing solution.
- Reproducing the issue may rely on the production data. If your company doesn’t have a way to clone your production data on a test environment, you will find your engineers forced to troubleshoot on the issue on a production system.
So Acme is in a tough place because they have a hard-to-reproduce issue that is frustrating the website users.
What do I do now?
Given that Tomcat is open source, there is a large community that you can reach out for Tomcat support that know the product literally inside and out.
Here, in order, is what we would recommend when you find yourself struggling to solve your production Tomcat issue:
- If you are missing the original resources that originally set up the product, utilize an open source support service to analyze your system, gather log messages, recommend best practices, perform Tomcat or Apache server tuning based on your situation, etc. in order to fix the server.
- Purchase consulting time from a remote support resource and outsource the problem to another party.
- Interview and hire a new employee with Tomcat and Java experience.
- Train one of your existing resources how to debug production Tomcat issues. Many training classes are offered as well as a plethora of documentation.
The key is to remember that you are not unsupported under open source software. You can purchase support as if you are purchasing support for Microsoft, except that you have companies and a community at your disposal.
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