Hi everyone, I am using Grails 6.2.1 with Java 17. After building the WAR file, I deployed it on a Tomcat 11 server running in a Java 17 environment. However, the WAR file is not running as expected on Tomcat. Interestingly, if I run the WAR file directly from the terminal using the following command, it works fine:

java -Dgrails.env=production -Xms512m -Xmx2048m -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:ParallelGCThreads=4 -jar icccplatform.war

Could anyone help me identify what I might be missing? Thank you!

Grails 6.2.1 is on Spring Boot 2.7.18 which supports a max tomcat version of 9.0.x. https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.springframework.boot/spring-boot-dependencies/2.7.18 Grails 7 looks like it will be on Spring Boot 3.4.x which supports Tomcat 10.1.x. https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.springframework.boot/spring-boot-dependencies/3.4.0 Grails 8 will likely be the first version to support Tomcat 11.

I will say from our experience: container based deployments with a self executing jar with embedded undertow was significantly faster on earlier versions of grails than tomcat. We were stunned at the responsiveness of the application under a container compared to a traditional linux machine deployment.

@jdaugherty did you ever try it out with Jetty? I personally prefer Jetty over tomcat.

I remember us discussing it but for our usages undertow was preferred

I posted this in the wrong thread earlier and it includes Jetty. That appears to hold true, although Java 21 narrows the difference between Undertow and Tomcat: https://medium.com/emlakjet/java-17-21-embedded-server-comparisons-696fa1d55e5e - wish this had server versions I've stuck with Tomcat, since it is default and it has served me well for ~23 years, but other options have often offered higher performance.

This is a very helpful post. Thanks. btw, grails makes it very cheap to switch between these three app engine. Can sprint boot do the same?

We're just changing the starter, so yeah

Thank you for all your responses. As informed by @James Fredley, I have tried running the war file in Tomcat 9 with configured Java 17, but I still haven't had any luck. Am I missing something? I am getting the message below, but the application is not running, and there is no log as well. INFO [main] org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployWAR Deployment of web application archive [myapp.war] has finished in [9,752] ms.

Make sure you are using the -plain file. https://docs.grails.org/6.2.2/guide/single.html#deployingAnApplication

Thank you all for your responses. And thanks to @James Fredley, it worked!