Page Comparison

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Several uPortal webapps write to their deployed webapps folder to add dynamic content to the portal (altering the Respondr Dynamic Skin and managing Attachments uploaded to uPortal are two use cases).  Insure the process Tomcat is running as has write access to CATALINA_BASE/webapps/* directories.  Typically this is done by having the same account tomcat is running as be the same account you use to build and deploy uPortal.

Tomcat 7 parallel startup (optional)

Tomcat 7.0.23+ can be configured to have multiple webapps start up in parallel, reducing server startup time.  Set the startStopThreads attribute of a Host to a value greater than one.  See http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/HowTo/FasterStartUp for more details and other suggestions.

GZipping HTML (optional but STRONGLY SUGGESTED unless doing it with Apache httpd or external appliance)

Browser-side performance may be improved somewhat by GZip-ping downloaded content where appropriate. uPortal 4 already GZips some CSS and JavaScript. uPortal does not, however, GZip the uPortal page itself.

GZipping of HTML content can be performed via Tomcat. To enable this functionality, set compression="on" in the in-use Tomcat connector, and optionally set the list of compressable mime types. More information about this feature can be found in the Tomcat configuration page.

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
    connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443"
    compression="on" compressableMimeType="text/html,text/xml,text/plain,text/css,text/javascript,application/javascript"/>

<!-- I added application/javascript to the default Tomcat 7 compressableMimeType value.
     You can optionally specify compressionMinSize or leave it at it's default value of 2048 bytes. -->

If you are fronting Tomcat wtih Apache or other hardware systems, you may want to do the compression in Apache or those systems instead.

Tomcat 7 parallel startup (optional)

Tomcat 7.0.23+ can be configured to have multiple webapps start up in parallel, reducing server startup time.  Set the startStopThreads attribute of a Host to a value greater than one.  See http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/HowTo/FasterStartUp for more details and other suggestions.

HTTP Session Timeout

To set the duration of HTTP sessions modify CATALINA_BASE/conf/web.xml and change the session-timeout element to the number of minutes desired.  Tomcat's default is 30 minutes.

<session-config>
    <session-timeout>30</session-timeout>
</session-config>

Further Tomcat Configurations

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