Clearing Tomcat & Appache Cache

[davehaigh]

Friday, I was on the phone with the hot-line trying to resolve a weird problem with my development installation of PDMLink. After trying a number of things the engineer asked me to shut down the services and clear out the logs and cache for Appache, Tomcat, and Windchill. After restarting the services all the problems with the system were gone.

So I'm wondering, has anyone developed a good way to clear out this stuff on an automated basis?

David Haigh
Phone: 925-424-3931
Fax: 925-423-7496
Lawrence Livermore National Lab
7000 East Ave, L-362
Livermore, CA 94550

[#2]

Yes, I tend to put into my Windchill stop batch file the clearing of all these caches. Kind of strange, given that I just spoke about this on my webcast last Friday (should be posted later this week @

[jessh]

I hear there are cases where one must remove files from Tomcat's work
directory to address issues.

This makes sense in 2 cases:

1. If one changes a .jsp or .jspf file such that the timestamp does
not increase as Tomcat would expect (i.e. so that it is newer than
the corresponding .class file) or makes certain types of changes
to a class directly used by such a file, then one will need to
force Tomcat to notice the change by clearing the compilation
results for the JSP(s) in question (or all JSPs to keep things
simple).
* I believe MORs produce this form of change.
2. If something goes awry in the application such that servlet
session state is corrupted and Tomcat is shutdown in a normal
fashion, it will capture the session state in a SESSIONS.ser
file. In this case this file will need to be removed so that
Tomcat will start fresh.
* There's also a config option that can be used to tell Tomcat
not to capture the session state to a file in such cases.
Tomcat normally does this to allow a quick restart of Tomcat
without loss of session state data, but if this is causing
issues it can be disabled.

I hear there are other cases, but to the best of my understanding these
/should/ be the only 2 such cases. Any insights that can be given as to
how to reproduce problems not falling into one of theses cases would
thus be appreciated (so that we can endeavor to fix any such issues...)
Differences between working and non-working 'work' directories would
also be helpful.

--
Jess Holle

[jessh]

To be clear #2 should not occur at all -- such cases would be bugs, but
at least the need to remove SESSIONS.ser in such cases is understood.