Tomcat 8 Slow startup with deployWAR

Question

I went from Tomcat 7.0.54 to 8.0.15, upgraded openSSL to 1.0.1k and tcnative to the latest 1.1.32 with APR 1.5.1.

However, Tomcat now starts about 2 to 3 times slower than before. Most noticeably, it takes alot longer to deploy WAR files.

Tomcat 7

Jan 20, 2015 3:39:36 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployWAR
INFO: Deployment of web application archive <PATH>\file.war has finished in 433 ms

Tomcat 8

Jan 21, 2015 2:27:01 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployWAR
INFO: Deployment of web application archive <PATH>\file.war has finished in 4,310 ms

This happens to all WAR files, all went from milliseconds to around 5 seconds.

I removed the JasperListener from the server.xml because it appears to have been removed.

unpackWARs="false"
autoDeploy="true"

unpackWars does not make a difference if set to true (atleast not noticable). I thought it might have been the annotation scanning issue fixed in 8.0.17, but no luck.

I noticed that jarsToSkip in catalina.properties changed from

tomcat.util.scan.DefaultJarScanner.jarsToSkip to
tomcat.util.scan.StandardJarScanFilter.jarsToSkip

and that org.apache.catalina.startup.TldConfig.jarsToSkip was removed and went to context.xml

<JarScanner>
    <JarScanFilter tldSkip="websocket-api.jar,tomcat-websocket.jar"/>
</JarScanner>

However, none of this seems to bring me back to the performance of tomcat 7. The one action that did do it, was removing the websocket jars. However we need them. This brings me to the conclusion that they are still scanned, even though they should be skipped.

Am I missing something? Does the context.xml not do the same as the catalina.properties jarsToSkip?

Answer 1

The solution for slow startup in general for me was to put in conf/context.xml:

<Context>
    <JarScanner>
        <JarScanFilter defaultPluggabilityScan="false" />
    </JarScanner>
</Context> 

Source: https://groups.google.com/a/apereo.org/forum/#!topic/sakai-dev/cjtYGxd6hG0