problem with tomcat

Question

We have recently deployed a corporate public website on Tomcat on a dedicated server. But we are facing a problem. When a jsp resource is requested (for example, index.jsp), most of the times it works well, but sometimes it gives "HTTP Status 404 - Servlet jsp is not available" error (for same index.jsp).

Now we are having difficulties to figure out the possible causes for it. Is there some problem with tomcat configuration? How can we figure out?

Please help.

Thanks Umar

Answer 1

Usually with tomcat, if you can't find an answer in the log files, you haven't turned up the logging high enough. You can tweak your log4j configuration so that everything is set to DEBUG. You'll probably want to turn particular libraries, like xerces to INFO or even WARN, so they don't drown out the logging you do care about. Your site will slow down as a result of the extra logging, but hopefully it won't be long before your problem occurs.

Let me know if you need help configuring log4j.

Answer 2

If you are running Tomcat behind Apache through the AJP connector, it can sometimes happen when you have something that caused a problem with Tomcat. Apache is still running but it has problems connecting via the AJP. So, it displays an error. Try running it directly off Tomcat if you are running it behind Apache.

Answer 3

If you haven't configured logging (in which case, you should), then the errors might well be going to stdout and/or to a default log file somewhere. Assuming you are running on a unix-type platform, a simple way to start troubleshooting is to redirect the stdout to a file when starting up

tomcat_start.sh >> stdout.txt 2>&1

or just look at the console when the error happens.