Enabling the Marlin renderer

The Marlin renderer is an open source Java rendering engine optimized for performance, based on OpenJDK’s Pisces implementation. With this, vector rendering in GeoServer is much improved over the standard engine.

The Marlin renderer is is installed and configured by default for OpenGeo Suite and OpenGeo Suite Enterprise installers and packages. You only need to manually enable the Marlin renderer if you are running OpenGeo Suite for Application Servers.

Windows application server

  1. Edit the setenv.bat file, located in <TOMCAT_HOME>\bin\ (where <TOMCAT_HOME> is the location where Tomcat is installed, such as C:\Program Files\Tomcat\).

    Note

    You may need to create this file if it doesn’t exist.

  2. Add the following line to the bottom of the file:

    set "JAVA_OPTS=-Xbootclasspath/a:<WEBAPPS_PATH>\geoserver\WEB-INF\lib\marlin-0.7.3-Unsafe.jar -Dsun.java2d.renderer=org.marlin.pisces.PiscesRenderingEngine"
    

    replacing <WEBAPPS_PATH> with the path to your application server’s webapps directory.

    Note

    If you already have a line that defines the JAVA_OPTS environment variable, you will want to edit it to include the options listed above.

  3. Save the file.

  4. Reload the application (or restart Tomcat).

Mac OS X and Linux application servers

  1. Edit the setenv.sh file, located in $TOMCAT_HOME/bin (where $TOMCAT_HOME is the location where Tomcat is installed, such as /opt/tomcat/).

    Note

    You may need to create this file if it doesn’t exist.

  2. Add the following line to the bottom of the file:

    export JAVA_OPTS="-Xbootclasspath/a:<WEBAPPS_PATH>/geoserver/WEB-INF/lib/marlin-0.7.3-Unsafe.jar -Dsun.java2d.renderer=org.marlin.pisces.PiscesRenderingEngine"
    

    replacing <WEBAPPS_PATH> with the path to your application server’s webapps directory.

    Note

    If you already have a line that defines the JAVA_OPTS environment variable, you will want to edit it to include the options listed above.

  3. Save the file.

  4. Reload the application (or restart Tomcat).