Hi everybody,
In this blogpost I want to share with you my local ThingWorx installation, with some optimizations that I did for local development.
-use the -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC . This uses the older Garbage Collector from the JVM, instead of the newer G1GC recommended by the ThingWorx Installation guide since version 7.2. The advantage of ConcMarkSweepGC is that the startup time is faster and the total memory footprint of the Tomcat is far lower than G1GC.
-use -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,address=1049,server=y,suspend=n. This allows using your Java IDE of choice to connect directly to the Tomcat server, then debugging your Extension code, or even the ThingWorx code using the Eclipse Class Decompilers for example. Please modify the 1049 to your port of choice for exposing the server debugging port.
-use -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=60000 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
This sets up the server to allow JMX monitoring. I usually use VisualVM from the JDK bin folder, but you can use any JMX monitoring tool.
This uses no Authentication, no SSL and uses port 6000 - modify if you need.
I usually startup Tomcat manually from a folder via startup.bat, and the setenv.bat looks like:
set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_102
set JRE_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_102
set THINGWORX_PLATFORM_SETTINGS=D:\Work\servers\apache-tomcat-8.0.33 // this is where the platform-settings.json file is located
set CATALINA_OPTS=-d64 -XX:+UseNUMA -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,address=1049,server=y,suspend=n -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=60000 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
In this mode I can look at any errors in almost real time from the console and it makes killing the server for Java Extension reload a breeze -> Ctrl+C
Please don't hesitate to provide feedback on this document, I certainly welcome it.
Be warned: THESE ARE NOT PRODUCTION SETTINGS.
Best regards,
Vladimir
