Tomcat deployment fun

Well we’re on the verge of deploying our first Grails 0.5.x project. The hosting company installed Tomcat for us from JPackage and my lord what a royal pain that was. They’re ripping it off the box now and putting a more regular tomcat distro on there. The JPackage one was setup to copy jars from /usr/share/java into Tomcat’s common/lib dir -every- time at startup.

That kind of think makes "NoTransportException: smtp" in JavaMail rather odd to debug when you delete the common/lib jars and – bang – they reappear later.

I don’t get this seemingly neverending JavaMail/tomcat problem anyway, I’ve seen it happening for years on different projects. I’ve never met somebody who understood this properly. I understand classloader problems, but I don’t understand why having JavaMail with SMTP in common/lib AND in an app’s WEB-INF/lib should cause it to say there is no SMTP transport. If anything it’s got TWO!

Having said all this, when we get there Grails 0.5 apps are deploying fine which is good to know. We’re also seeing some pretty sick performance on this 2x 2-core CPU HP rack. Ajax requests circa 450 per second (no db hits, just a bunch of groovy logic) using apache benchmark. GSP requests over 100 per second.