How to manage Tomcat release/deploy to have least downtime with Tomcat6

Question

I realize Tomcat7 has the feature of parallel deployment, but I was not able to use it because it seemed to have some bugs on Linux so I had to downgrade to Tomcat6.

What I am wondering is how to set up a deploy process so that the site experiences the least downtime. In the past when I deployed .war files, it created downtime during the upload and the reboot of Tomcat.

Is there any way to minimize the deploy-related downtime?

Thanks, Alex

Answer 1

Another way is:

Change the name of the file when you upload it

Stop tomcat

delete old war and expansion

rename new war to correct name eg ROOT.war

start tomcat

P.s: Sometimes it allows you to delete and rename files without stopping tomcat. In that case you can do the delete-rename operation and just restart tomcat at the end