4.2. Standard Server Configurations

The JBoss Enterprise Platform ships with four server configurations. You can choose which configuration to start by passing the -c parameter to the server startup script. For instance, command run.sh -c all would start the server in the all configuration. Each configuration is contained in a directory named jboss-as/server/[config name]/. You can look into each server configuration's directory to see the default services, applications, and libraries supported in the configuration.
  • The minimal configuration starts the core server container without any of the enterprise services. It is a good starting point if you want to build a customized version of JBoss AS that only contains the servers you need.
  • The default configuration is the mostly common used configuration for application developers. It supports the standard J2EE 1.4 and most of the Java EE 5.0 programming APIs (e.g., JSF and EJB3).
  • The all configuration is the default configuration with clustering support and other enterprise extensions.
  • The production configuration is based on the all configuration but with key parameters pre-tuned for production deployment.
The detailed services and APIs supported in each of those configurations will be discussed throughout this book. In this section, we focus on the optimization we did for the production configuration.

4.2.1. The production Configuration

To start the server in the production configuration, you can use the following command under Linux / Unix: 
cd /path/to/jboss-as
RUN_CONF=server/production/run.conf bin/run.sh -c production
Or, you can simply copy the jboss-as/server/production/run.conf file to jboss-as/bin directory and start the server with run.sh -c production command. Below is a list of optimizations we specifically did for the production configuration:
  • In the jboss-as/server/production/run.conf file, we expanded the memory size of the server to 1.7 GB. We added the -server tag to JVM startup command on all platforms except for Darwin (Mac OS X). If the JVM is BEA jRockit, the -Xgc:gencon parameter is also added.
  • We configured the key generation algorithm to use the database to generate HiLo keys in order to generate the correct keys in a cluster environment (see deploy/uuid-key-generator.sar/META-INF/jboss-service.xml).
  • We set the ScanPeriod parameter to 60000 in conf/jboss-minimal.xml and conf/jboss-service.xml, so that JBoss AS does not spend too much time constantly scanning the deploy directory for new or updated deployments.
  • We removed the connection monitoring in deploy/jbossjca-service.xml. The connection monitoring feature helps catch unclosed connections that would otherwise cause leaks in the connection pools in development. However, it is a global point of contention that should be turned off (false) in production.
  • Logging is a big contention point in many production applications. In the production configuration, we removed the console logging and increased the logging level to WARN and ERROR for most packages. Please see details in conf/jboss-log4j.xml.