[CentOS] Tomcat does not end process.

[Mathieu Baudier]

>> running tomcat apps right?  Being a lil curious what is tomcat-native do
>> to fix it?  I'm just curious to the fact that I'm considering using
>> tomcat for message translation.
>
> If it starts them it should stop them.  Has anyone done a comparison of
> tomcat-native (looks to be tomcat6 with native APR code embedded) to the
> stock centos tomcat5?  Any incompatibilities?

Actually tomcat-native is just a JNI (Java Native Interface) bridge
with the APR library.
It therefore complements standard tomcat packages and do not replace them.

I assume that the one provided by EPEL is compatible with tomcat5
since this is this version that ships with RHEL/CentOS.
The tomcat-native in EPEL is a pretty recent version (1.1.18 whereas
1.1.20 has just been released:
http://tomcat.apache.org/download-native.cgi), so they probably ensure
compatibility with both Tomcat 5 and 6.

On our side, we use Tomcat 6 running as an OSGi bundle within an
Equinox OSGi runtime (we use the version packaged and optimized by
Spring Source in their enterprise bundle repository) and it is
compatible with the tomcat-native provided by EPEL.

As I said, tomcat-native solved some weird issues I had on Fedora
starting with Fedora 11, but that I don't have on CentOS 5.4 (I still
suggested it to the OP even if I don't think that it would be the most
rigorous approach)

Recently, I started to have some crashes with tomcat-native on my
(CentOS) development environment when under load and since I use a non
standard JDK and Tomcat (from a CentOS/EPEL point of view) I did not
take the time to dig further and simply removed it.

The problem when it crashes (as often with JNI) is that the whole JVM crashes.
The fact that a JVM rarely crashes is for me a big + of Java,
especially when running in an OSGi runtime where you can dynamically
correct and reload components.

So, the current state of my thoughts regarding tomcat-native is that
you should not assume that it will always be better to have it than
not (as I tended to).
It was apparently designed to bring httpd-like performances for huge
deployments and is probably a great tool in such settings, but I would
rather stay away from it until you are not sure that you really need
it.