Tomcat connector query

[Sanu Soman]

Hi All,

Could you please suggest which all tomcat connector is available to use for jira (configured https) instance? Currently we are using NIO connector. Is the NIO is the better one or do we have something else?

Please see our server.xml file.

<!-- Customized Tomcat configuration for Atlassian Bamboo -->
<Server port="8101" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">

  <!-- Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="off" / -->

  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" />
  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener"/>
  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.GlobalResourcesLifecycleListener"/>

  <Service name="Catalina">
    <Executor name="main" namePrefix="HTTP" />
    <Connector port="8080" protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol" connectionTimeout="20000"  maxHeaderSize="8192" executor="main" redirectPort="443" URIEncoding="UTF-8"
        scheme="https" proxyName="domain name" proxyPort="443" secure="false" useBodyEncodingForURI="true"/>
    <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost">
      <Host name="localhost">
          <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs" prefix="access." suffix=".log" pattern="common" resolveHosts="false"/>
      </Host>
    </Engine>
  </Service>

</Server>

If possible, could you please share some docs to understand this in better, thanks.

[Sabine Winkler · Accepted solution]

Hi,

not sure if I understand your question completely. Your JIRA is running on Tomcat which provides several connectors to use - BIO (blocking), NIO (non-blocking) and APR (Apache Portable Runtime). To configure one of these connectors you can follow the tomcat configuration for connectors [1].

At the ent of this page you will find a connector comparison to figure out the main differences [2].

NIO might be interesting for you if you want to use low level socket properties. From [4]:

"BIO means if you use http with keep-alive parameter then you will continue to use that thread in order to maintain keep-alive connection while with Non-Blocking IO Connectors you don't need to use thread to maintain keep-alive requests, so you can make efficient use of threads here "

Because I don't know much about JIRA and its runtime behaviour I cannot recommend one connector in advance. Based on the JIRA documentation they use the HTTP standard (BIO) connector - here you find the HTTPS configuration [3].

A benchmark on this topic would be nice.

HTH, Sabine

[1] http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/http.html

[2] http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/http.html#Connector_Comparison

[3] https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA044/Running+JIRA+over+SSL+or+HTTPS#RunningJIRAoverSSLorHTTPS-ConfigureHTTPSinTomcat

[4] http://www.genericarticles.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=How_to_optimize_tomcat_performance_in_production

[Sanu Soman]

Thanks for the detailed information :)

[Sanu Soman]

I guess there are three connectors available,
1. org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol - same as HTTP/1.1 (BIO)
2. org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol - non blocking Java connector (NIO)
3. org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11AprProtocol - the APR connector (APR)

So in our case, if we want to change NIO to any other which all steps to we need to take care? (actually our JIRA is configured over https). Please suggest.