We are running into an issue were now when we deploy portlets we have a 50/50 chance of getting permgen errors and we have to restart the box to fix them and everything works fine then.... It looks like its a classloader issue with Tomcat and we have tried every JAVAOPTS addition trying to fix it but nothing really seems to work....

My question is 2 fold
1)Has anyone had this issue and fixed it?
2)One solution we have seen is move all common JARS (ICEFACES in this instance) to a server side lib (common/lib) folder and not include them in the application itself...Anyone done this?
2a) This could cause issues when we are ready to upgrade to the next version so my sub question is it possible to create a server side classpath that you can specifically use but is not part of the greater class path.... For example create a icefaces1.7.2 folder and in my portlet say use that as a classpath but when we upgrade create a 1.8 folder and new portlets would use it and the old portlets would still use the old one.....

We are on Tomcat 5.5.26 and Java 1.5
Thanks
Whit

Permgens anyone? Is anyone else using Tomcat for a production server?

PermGen is the space where java stores - if I recall correctly - class file information etc.

To operate liferay you definitely have to tweak that space from the jvm's default - how much you have to tweak it, depends on your installation and what you do with it.

Tomcat as a production server is no problem. If you run into PermGen problems after a few deployments you should

• check the size of your deployments
• check if you really need frequent deployments on a production server - you could restart the server for a new deployment
• provide more permgen space to the jvm

or a combination of all of the above.

I suppose you already googled PermGen and know about the general purpose of this piece of memory.

You can get a lot out of tomcat if you finetune the jvm settings. I can't recommend specific settings, as it completely depends on your specific setup. Just sticking with the default options will give you the default performance, which can be made a lot better. Michael Han talked about performance tuning on the recent European Symposium. I don't know if the slides are published yet, but you might be able to find some hints there once they are public.