Production¶

Java Settings¶

GeoWebCache speed depends in part on the chosen Java Runtime Environment (JRE). For best performance use a Java 6 JRE. If not possible, use a Java 5 JRE. JREs other than those released by Sun may work correctly, but are not tested nor supported.

GeoWebCache does not need a lot of heap memory assigned to the JVM. Usually 512M is just fine if its the only web application running on the servlet container.

Servlet container settings¶

Depending on the power of your hardware setup and your expected user load, consider increasing the number of concurrent connections the servlet container is allowed to handle. For a high end set up you can even set it to 2000. In Tomcat, that’s performed by modifying the maxThreads attribute for the tomcatThreadPool Executor in server.xml.

Open Files¶

GeoWebCache will probably open lots of files from the file system the cache is stored on, depending on the request load, though through short periods of time, as it opens the tile files to deliver their contents to the client. Therefore it is recommended that you set your Operating System settings to allow for at least 4 times as much open files the number of maximum concurrent connections configured in your servlet container.

File System Performance¶

Storing tiles on a NFS mount point is known to be slow. Ext3, Ext4 and XFS are known to perform well. btrfs should be ok too, as well as ZFS, though we didn’t actually test on them. Depending on the average tile size, a too small block size may lead to too much fragmentation, and a too big block size to too much wasted storage space.

If possible, turn off File System’s last access time (atime) as it avoids writing to the File System for every tile read (check Criticism of atime ).

File System Block Size¶

Since the Tile Cache stores thousands or even millions of files, the File System block size is of great importance for optimizing the actually used storage space for the cache. If that could be an issue, consider tuning your File System block size. Modern file systems usually have a default block size of 16K, which should be fine for most situations. If your average tile is a small 8-bit png you may want to use a 8K block size. If its a large JPEG you may want to increase the block size to 64K.

If the block size is too large, it’s more likely that more disk space is gonna be wasted (since a tile file will use an integral number of blocks on disk, as for any file in your file system). If the block size is too small, performance will probably degrade as more I/O operations will be needed to read a single file.

Seed Failure Tolerance¶

As of version 1.2.5, it is possible to control how GWC behaves in the event that a backend (WMS for example) request fails during seeding, by using the following environment variables:

• GWC_SEED_RETRY_COUNT : specifies how many times to retry a failed request for each tile being seeded. Use 0 for no retries, or any higher number. Defaults to 0, meaning no retries are performed. It also means that the defaults to the other two variables do not apply at least you specify a higher value for GWC_SEED_RETRY_COUNT.
• GWC_SEED_RETRY_WAIT : specifies how much to wait before each retry upon a failure to seed a tile, in milliseconds. Defaults to 100ms
• GWC_SEED_ABORT_LIMIT : specifies the aggregated number of failures that a group of seeding threads should reach before aborting the seeding operation as a whole. This value is shared by all the threads launched as a single thread group; so if the value is 10 and you launch a seed task with four threads, when 10 failures are reached by all or any of those four threads the four threads will abort the seeding task. The default is 1000.

These environment variables can be established by any of the following ways, in order of precedence:

• As a Java environment variable: for example java -DGWC_SEED_RETRY_COUNT=5 ...
• As a Servlet context parameter in the web application’s WEB-INF/web.xml configuration file. for example:

<context-param>
  <!-- milliseconds between each retry upon a backend request failure -->
  <param-name>GWC_SEED_RETRY_WAIT</param-name>
  <param-value>500</param-value>
</context-param>

• As a System environment variable: export GWC_SEED_ABORT_LIMIT=2000; <your usual command to run GWC here> (or for Tomcat, use the Tomcat’s CATALINA_OPTS in Tomcat’s bin/catalina.sh as this: CATALINA_OPTS=”GWC_SEED_ABORT_LIMIT=2000 GWC_SEED_RETRY_COUNT=2