Is there a way to cut down Memory and TomCat Usage when running multiple products?

[Fred Mastropasqua]

I'm evaulating Jira, Confluance, Fisheye/Crucible and Stash.

I feel like it's an over kill that a tomcat6.exe, tomcat7.exe and also two java apps that also host their own tomcat I assume on the same machine. I can host 100's of website running IIS with little memory usage. Running all these products I'm using up over 2GB.

tomat6.exe (I think this is confluance) 740mb

tomcat7.exe (Jira) 400mb

java.exe (Stash or Fisheye) 515mb

java.exe (Stash or Fisheye) 430mb

Amounts flucuate but you can see my concern is seems you need a really beefy box if you plan to run all that and SQL Server and IIS. (Yes I know SQL should be on it's own machine, don't want to discuss that).

Is there anyway to run one instance of Tomcat and have each of the products just run as web sites under that instance? Or someway to combine all of these into something that takes up less resources?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

In theory, you could put them all into the same Tomcat. In reality, don't.

The Atlassian applications prefer separate Tomcats for the sake of simplicity. Running two of them in one container means dependency hell, shared resourcing conflicts, less flexibility on maintenance, and the list goes on. Worst of all, it wouldn't actually reduce the resource use much. The actual Tomcat processing is tiny and reducing it to a single Tomcat doesn't quarter the resources they do use. Atlassian do not support more than one application in a Tomcat.

Bear in mind that the sites you run in IIS are not applications, they don't need much resource because they aren't doing a fraction of what the Atlassian stuff does.

As for 2Gb for that stack, I'm afraid it's a little low, I'd add more memory if you want to run that stack on the same box.

[Matthew Park]

I think the issue is probably all the third-party dependencies. For example if each jar for Jira/Bamboo/Bitbucket use Spring/Hibernate when you start each application jar they also start their own instance of spring/hibernate plus any other third-party dependencies. If they combined all of their application jars into a single jar that shared those dependencies I'd suspect you'd see a lot smaller memory footprint.