Advantage of Migrating to Tomcat 7.0.29 When JIRA 5.2 is Released

[Mark Symons]

The "Supported Platforms" page states that JIRA v5.2 will support Tomcat 7.0.29.

What will be the advantages to JIRA if upgrading Tomcat from 6.0.32?

On the "which version?" Tomcat page, I read:

...implements the Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2 and EL 2.2 specifications. In addition to that, it includes the following improvements:

• Web application memory leak detection and prevention
• Improved security for the Manager and Host Manager applications
• Generic CSRF protection
• Support for including external content directly in a web application
• Refactoring (connectors, lifecycle) and lots of internal code clean-up

That all sounds great but how to phrase it in JIRA-centric terms so that I decide whether it's worth the effort to "sell" it to the decision makers in my company?

[Harry Chan · Accepted solution]

Hi, to answer your points below:

• Web application memory leak detection and prevention --> reduces crashes, out of memory errors, reduces memory usage - allows JIRA to be more stable, reliable and up for longer. It will also help for cleaner shutdowns and restarts.
• Improved security for the Manager and Host Manager applications --> not really used by JIRA.
• Generic CSRF protection --> helps improves security.
• Support for including external content directly in a web application --> don't think it's used by JIRA either
• Refactoring (connectors, lifecycle) and lots of internal code clean-up --> nothing specific to an end user

Overall, from my experience with Java web apps, Tomcat 7 has greater performance, uses less memory and is more stable compared to Tomcat 6. Tomcat 6 has been out for many years. Even Tomcat 7 has been out for quite a while now and has proven to be stable with the many point releases.

If it isn't a lot of work and there aren't too many dependencies, I'd suggest it as the way to go.

As usual, best to test on a test environment first.

[Mark Symons]

Thanks for the info. Yup, I'll be trying it in a test environment first.

[Mark Symons]

I have now upgraded two JIRA servers, both starting from v4.4.4. One was upgraded to v5.2 and and the other to v5.2.2.

Both upgrades resulted in an automatic upgrade of Tomcat and Java:

• Java Version 1.6.0_35
• Application Server Container Apache Tomcat/7.0.29

Thus, there is no decision to be made by Admins: you'll move from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 without having to worry about it.

I cannot yet say whether memory usage (or anything else) has improved... but there's definitely been no problems.