Apache Tomcat 8 Configuration Reference

A boolean value which can be used to enable or disable the TRACE HTTP method. If not specified, this attribute is set to false.

The default timeout for asynchronous requests in milliseconds. If not specified, this attribute is set to the Servlet specification default of 30000 (30 seconds).

Set to true if you want calls to request.getRemoteHost() to perform DNS lookups in order to return the actual host name of the remote client. Set to false to skip the DNS lookup and return the IP address in String form instead (thereby improving performance). By default, DNS lookups are disabled.

The maximum number of headers in a request that are allowed by the container. A request that contains more headers than the specified limit will be rejected. A value of less than 0 means no limit. If not specified, a default of 100 is used.

The maximum number of parameter and value pairs (GET plus POST) which will be automatically parsed by the container. Parameter and value pairs beyond this limit will be ignored. A value of less than 0 means no limit. If not specified, a default of 10000 is used. Note that FailedRequestFilter filter can be used to reject requests that hit the limit.

The maximum size in bytes of the POST which will be handled by the container FORM URL parameter parsing. The limit can be disabled by setting this attribute to a value less than or equal to 0. If not specified, this attribute is set to 2097152 (2 megabytes).

The maximum size in bytes of the POST which will be saved/buffered by the container during FORM or CLIENT-CERT authentication. For both types of authentication, the POST will be saved/buffered before the user is authenticated. For CLIENT-CERT authentication, the POST is buffered for the duration of the SSL handshake and the buffer emptied when the request is processed. For FORM authentication the POST is saved whilst the user is re-directed to the login form and is retained until the user successfully authenticates or the session associated with the authentication request expires. The limit can be disabled by setting this attribute to -1. Setting the attribute to zero will disable the saving of POST data during authentication. If not specified, this attribute is set to 4096 (4 kilobytes).

A comma-separated list of HTTP methods for which request bodies will be parsed for request parameters identically to POST. This is useful in RESTful applications that want to support POST-style semantics for PUT requests. Note that any setting other than POST causes Tomcat to behave in a way that goes against the intent of the servlet specification. The HTTP method TRACE is specifically forbidden here in accordance with the HTTP specification. The default is POST

The TCP port number on which this Connector will create a server socket and await incoming connections. Your operating system will allow only one server application to listen to a particular port number on a particular IP address. If the special value of 0 (zero) is used, then Tomcat will select a free port at random to use for this connector. This is typically only useful in embedded and testing applications.

Sets the protocol to handle incoming traffic. The default value is HTTP/1.1 which uses an auto-switching mechanism to select either a non blocking Java based connector or an APR/native based connector. If the PATH (Windows) or LD_LIBRARY_PATH (on most unix systems) environment variables contain the Tomcat native library, the APR/native connector will be used. If the native library cannot be found, the non blocking Java based connector will be used. Note that the APR/native connector has different settings for HTTPS than the Java connectors.
To use an explicit protocol rather than rely on the auto-switching mechanism described above, the following values may be used:
org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol - blocking Java connector
org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol - non blocking Java connector
org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Nio2Protocol - non blocking Java connector
org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11AprProtocol - the APR/native connector.
Custom implementations may also be used.
Take a look at our Connector Comparison chart. The configuration for both Java connectors is identical, for http and https.
For more information on the APR connector and APR specific SSL settings please visit the APR documentation

If this Connector is being used in a proxy configuration, configure this attribute to specify the server name to be returned for calls to request.getServerName(). See Proxy Support for more information.

If this Connector is being used in a proxy configuration, configure this attribute to specify the server port to be returned for calls to request.getServerPort(). See Proxy Support for more information.

If this Connector is supporting non-SSL requests, and a request is received for which a matching <security-constraint> requires SSL transport, Catalina will automatically redirect the request to the port number specified here.

Set this attribute to the name of the protocol you wish to have returned by calls to request.getScheme(). For example, you would set this attribute to "https" for an SSL Connector. The default value is "http".

Set this attribute to true if you wish to have calls to request.isSecure() to return true for requests received by this Connector. You would want this on an SSL Connector or a non SSL connector that is receiving data from a SSL accelerator, like a crypto card, a SSL appliance or even a webserver. The default value is false.

This specifies the character encoding used to decode the URI bytes, after %xx decoding the URL. If not specified, UTF-8 will be used unless the org.apache.catalina.STRICT_SERVLET_COMPLIANCE system property is set to true in which case ISO-8859-1 will be used.

This specifies if the encoding specified in contentType should be used for URI query parameters, instead of using the URIEncoding. This setting is present for compatibility with Tomcat 4.1.x, where the encoding specified in the contentType, or explicitly set using Request.setCharacterEncoding method was also used for the parameters from the URL. The default value is false.

Set this attribute to true to cause Tomcat to use the IP address that the request was received on to determine the Host to send the request to. The default value is false.

Set this attribute to true to cause Tomcat to advertise support for the Servlet specification using the header recommended in the specification. The default value is false.

The maximum queue length for incoming connection requests when all possible request processing threads are in use. Any requests received when the queue is full will be refused. The default value is 100.

The number of threads to be used to accept connections. Increase this value on a multi CPU machine, although you would never really need more than 2. Also, with a lot of non keep alive connections, you might want to increase this value as well. Default value is 1.

The priority of the acceptor threads. The threads used to accept new connections. The default value is 5 (the value of the java.lang.Thread.NORM_PRIORITY constant). See the JavaDoc for the java.lang.Thread class for more details on what this priority means.

For servers with more than one IP address, this attribute specifies which address will be used for listening on the specified port. By default, this port will be used on all IP addresses associated with the server.

Controls when the socket used by the connector is bound. By default it is bound when the connector is initiated and unbound when the connector is destroyed. If set to false, the socket will be bound when the connector is started and unbound when it is stopped.

The value is a comma separated list of MIME types for which HTTP compression may be used. The default value is text/html,text/xml,text/plain.

The Connector may use HTTP/1.1 GZIP compression in an attempt to save server bandwidth. The acceptable values for the parameter is "off" (disable compression), "on" (allow compression, which causes text data to be compressed), "force" (forces compression in all cases), or a numerical integer value (which is equivalent to "on", but specifies the minimum amount of data before the output is compressed). If the content-length is not known and compression is set to "on" or more aggressive, the output will also be compressed. If not specified, this attribute is set to "off".

Note: There is a tradeoff between using compression (saving your bandwidth) and using the sendfile feature (saving your CPU cycles). If the connector supports the sendfile feature, e.g. the NIO connector, using sendfile will take precedence over compression. The symptoms will be that static files greater that 48 Kb will be sent uncompressed. You can turn off sendfile by setting useSendfile attribute of the connector, as documented below, or change the sendfile usage threshold in the configuration of the DefaultServlet in the default conf/web.xml or in the web.xml of your web application.

If compression is set to "on" then this attribute may be used to specify the minimum amount of data before the output is compressed. If not specified, this attribute is defaults to "2048".

The number of seconds during which the sockets used by this Connector will linger when they are closed. The default value is -1 which disables socket linger.

The number of milliseconds this Connector will wait, after accepting a connection, for the request URI line to be presented. Use a value of -1 to indicate no (i.e. infinite) timeout. The default value is 60000 (i.e. 60 seconds) but note that the standard server.xml that ships with Tomcat sets this to 20000 (i.e. 20 seconds). Unless disableUploadTimeout is set to false, this timeout will also be used when reading the request body (if any).

Specifies the timeout, in milliseconds, to use while a data upload is in progress. This only takes effect if disableUploadTimeout is set to false.

This flag allows the servlet container to use a different, usually longer connection timeout during data upload. If not specified, this attribute is set to true which disables this longer timeout.

A reference to the name in an Executor element. If this attribute is set, and the named executor exists, the connector will use the executor, and all the other thread attributes will be ignored. Note that if a shared executor is not specified for a connector then the connector will use a private, internal executor to provide the thread pool.

The time that the private internal executor will wait for request processing threads to terminate before continuing with the process of stopping the connector. If not set, the default is 0 (zero) for the BIO connector and 5000 (5 seconds) for the NIO, NIO2 and APR/native connectors.

The number of milliseconds this Connector will wait for another HTTP request before closing the connection. The default value is to use the value that has been set for the connectionTimeout attribute. Use a value of -1 to indicate no (i.e. infinite) timeout.

The maximum number of connections that the server will accept and process at any given time. When this number has been reached, the server will accept, but not process, one further connection. This additional connection be blocked until the number of connections being processed falls below maxConnections at which point the server will start accepting and processing new connections again. Note that once the limit has been reached, the operating system may still accept connections based on the acceptCount setting. The default value varies by connector type. For BIO the default is the value of maxThreads unless an Executor is used in which case the default will be the value of maxThreads from the executor. For NIO and NIO2 the default is 10000. For APR/native, the default is 8192.

Note that for APR/native on Windows, the configured value will be reduced to the highest multiple of 1024 that is less than or equal to maxConnections. This is done for performance reasons.
If set to a value of -1, the maxConnections feature is disabled and connections are not counted.

Limits the total length of chunk extensions in chunked HTTP requests. If the value is -1, no limit will be imposed. If not specified, the default value of 8192 will be used.

The maximum size of the request and response HTTP header, specified in bytes. If not specified, this attribute is set to 8192 (8 KB).

The maximum number of HTTP requests which can be pipelined until the connection is closed by the server. Setting this attribute to 1 will disable HTTP/1.0 keep-alive, as well as HTTP/1.1 keep-alive and pipelining. Setting this to -1 will allow an unlimited amount of pipelined or keep-alive HTTP requests. If not specified, this attribute is set to 100.

The maximum number of request body bytes (excluding transfer encoding overhead) that will be swallowed by Tomcat for an aborted upload. An aborted upload is when Tomcat knows that the request body is going to be ignored but the client still sends it. If Tomcat does not swallow the body the client is unlikely to see the response. If not specified the default of 2097152 (2 megabytes) will be used. A value of less than zero indicates that no limit should be enforced.

The maximum number of request processing threads to be created by this Connector, which therefore determines the maximum number of simultaneous requests that can be handled. If not specified, this attribute is set to 200. If an executor is associated with this connector, this attribute is ignored as the connector will execute tasks using the executor rather than an internal thread pool.

Limits the total length of trailing headers in the last chunk of a chunked HTTP request. If the value is -1, no limit will be imposed. If not specified, the default value of 8192 will be used.

The minimum number of threads always kept running. If not specified, the default of 10 is used.

The value is a regular expression (using java.util.regex) matching the user-agent header of HTTP clients for which compression should not be used, because these clients, although they do advertise support for the feature, have a broken implementation. The default value is an empty String (regexp matching disabled).

The protocol handler caches Processor objects to speed up performance. This setting dictates how many of these objects get cached. -1 means unlimited, default is 200. If not using Servlet 3.0 asynchronous processing, a good default is to use the same as the maxThreads setting. If using Servlet 3.0 asynchronous processing, a good default is to use the larger of maxThreads and the maximum number of expected concurrent requests (synchronous and asynchronous).

The value is a regular expression (using java.util.regex) matching the user-agent header of HTTP clients for which HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/1.0 keep alive should not be used, even if the clients advertise support for these features. The default value is an empty String (regexp matching disabled).

Overrides the Server header for the http response. If set, the value for this attribute overrides the Tomcat default and any Server header set by a web application. If not set, any value specified by the application is used. If the application does not specify a value then Apache-Coyote/1.1 is used. Unless you are paranoid, you won't need this feature.

The size (in bytes) of the buffer to be provided for socket output buffering. -1 can be specified to disable the use of a buffer. By default, a buffers of 9000 bytes will be used.

Use this attribute to enable SSL traffic on a connector. To turn on SSL handshake/encryption/decryption on a connector set this value to true. The default value is false. When turning this value true you will want to set the scheme and the secure attributes as well to pass the correct request.getScheme() and request.isSecure() values to the servlets See SSL Support for more information.

If set to true, the TCP_NO_DELAY option will be set on the server socket, which improves performance under most circumstances. This is set to true by default.

The priority of the request processing threads within the JVM. The default value is 5 (the value of the java.lang.Thread.NORM_PRIORITY constant). See the JavaDoc for the java.lang.Thread class for more details on what this priority means.

The default size of the buffer to allocate to for asynchronous writes that can not be completed in a single operation. Data that can't be written immediately will be stored in this buffer until it can be written. If more data needs to be stored than space is available in the buffer than the size of the buffer will be increased for the duration of the write. If not specified the default value of 8192 will be used.

(int)The socket receive buffer (SO_RCVBUF) size in bytes. JVM default used if not set.

(int)The socket send buffer (SO_SNDBUF) size in bytes. JVM default used if not set.

(bool)This is equivalent to standard attribute tcpNoDelay.

(bool)Boolean value for the socket's keep alive setting (SO_KEEPALIVE). JVM default used if not set.

(bool)Boolean value for the socket OOBINLINE setting. JVM default used if not set.

(bool)Boolean value for the sockets reuse address option (SO_REUSEADDR). JVM default used if not set.

(bool)Boolean value for the sockets so linger option (SO_LINGER). A value for the standard attribute connectionLinger that is >=0 is equivalent to setting this to true. A value for the standard attribute connectionLinger that is <0 is equivalent to setting this to false. Both this attribute and soLingerTime must be set else the JVM defaults will be used for both.

(int)Value in seconds for the sockets so linger option (SO_LINGER). This is equivalent to standard attribute connectionLinger. Both this attribute and soLingerOn must be set else the JVM defaults will be used for both.

This is equivalent to standard attribute connectionTimeout.

(int)The first value for the performance settings. See Socket Performance Options All three performance attributes must be set else the JVM defaults will be used for all three.

(int)The second value for the performance settings. See Socket Performance Options All three performance attributes must be set else the JVM defaults will be used for all three.

(int)The third value for the performance settings. See Socket Performance Options All three performance attributes must be set else the JVM defaults will be used for all three.

(int) The timeout for a socket unlock. When a connector is stopped, it will try to release the acceptor thread by opening a connector to itself. The default value is 250 and the value is in milliseconds

The percentage of processing threads that have to be in use before HTTP keep-alives are disabled to improve scalability. Values less than 0 will be changed to 0 and values greater than 100 will be changed to 100. If not specified, the default value is 75.

(int)The number of threads to be used to run for the polling events. Default value is 1 per processor but not more than 2.
When accepting a socket, the operating system holds a global lock. So the benefit of going above 2 threads diminishes rapidly. Having more than one thread is for system that need to accept connections very rapidly. However usually just increasing acceptCount will solve that problem. Increasing this value may also be beneficial when a large amount of send file operations are going on.

(int)The priority of the poller threads. The default value is 5 (the value of the java.lang.Thread.NORM_PRIORITY constant). See the JavaDoc for the java.lang.Thread class for more details on what this priority means.

(int)The time in milliseconds to timeout on a select() for the poller. This value is important, since connection clean up is done on the same thread, so do not set this value to an extremely high one. The default value is 1000 milliseconds.

(bool)Whether to allow comet servlets or not. Default value is true.

(bool)Use this attribute to enable or disable sendfile capability. The default value is true. Note that the use of sendfile will disable any compression that Tomcat may otherwise have performed on the response.

(bool)Boolean value, whether to use direct ByteBuffers or java mapped ByteBuffers. Default is false.
When you are using direct buffers, make sure you allocate the appropriate amount of memory for the direct memory space. On Sun's JDK that would be something like -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=256m.

(int)Each connection that is opened up in Tomcat get associated with a read ByteBuffer. This attribute controls the size of this buffer. By default this read buffer is sized at 8192 bytes. For lower concurrency, you can increase this to buffer more data. For an extreme amount of keep alive connections, decrease this number or increase your heap size.

(int)Each connection that is opened up in Tomcat get associated with a write ByteBuffer. This attribute controls the size of this buffer. By default this write buffer is sized at 8192 bytes. For low concurrency you can increase this to buffer more response data. For an extreme amount of keep alive connections, decrease this number or increase your heap size.
The default value here is pretty low, you should up it if you are not dealing with tens of thousands concurrent connections.

(int)The NIO connector uses a class called NioChannel that holds elements linked to a socket. To reduce garbage collection, the NIO connector caches these channel objects. This value specifies the size of this cache. The default value is 500, and represents that the cache will hold 500 NioChannel objects. Other values are -1 for unlimited cache and 0 for no cache.

(int)The NioChannel pool can also be size based, not used object based. The size is calculated as follows:
NioChannel buffer size = read buffer size + write buffer size
SecureNioChannel buffer size = application read buffer size + application write buffer size + network read buffer size + network write buffer size
The value is in bytes, the default value is 1024*1024*100 (100MB).

(int)Tomcat will cache SocketProcessor objects to reduce garbage collection. The integer value specifies how many objects to keep in the cache at most. The default is 500. Other values are -1 for unlimited cache and 0 for no cache.

(int)Tomcat will cache KeyAttachment objects to reduce garbage collection. The integer value specifies how many objects to keep in the cache at most. The default is 500. Other values are -1 for unlimited cache and 0 for no cache.

(int)Tomcat will cache PollerEvent objects to reduce garbage collection. The integer value specifies how many objects to keep in the cache at most. The default is 500. Other values are -1 for unlimited cache and 0 for no cache.

(int)The max selectors to be used in the pool, to reduce selector contention. Use this option when the command line org.apache.tomcat.util.net.NioSelectorShared value is set to false. Default value is 200.

(int)The max spare selectors to be used in the pool, to reduce selector contention. When a selector is returned to the pool, the system can decide to keep it or let it be GC'd. Use this option when the command line org.apache.tomcat.util.net.NioSelectorShared value is set to false. Default value is -1 (unlimited).

The following command line options are available for the NIO connector:
-Dorg.apache.tomcat.util.net.NioSelectorShared=true|false - default is true. Set this value to false if you wish to use a selector for each thread. When you set it to false, you can control the size of the pool of selectors by using the selectorPool.maxSelectors attribute.

(int)The NIO connector implements an OutOfMemoryError strategy called parachute. It holds a chunk of data as a byte array. In case of an OOM, this chunk of data is released and the error is reported. This will give the VM enough room to clean up. The oomParachute represents the size in bytes of the parachute(the byte array). The default value is 1024*1024(1MB). Please note, this only works for OOM errors regarding the Java Heap space, and there is absolutely no guarantee that you will be able to recover at all. If you have an OOM outside of the Java Heap, then this parachute trick will not help.

(bool)Use this attribute to enable or disable object caching to reduce the amount of GC objects produced. The default value is false.

(bool)Whether to allow comet servlets or not. Default value is true.

(bool)Use this attribute to enable or disable sendfile capability. The default value is true. Note that the use of sendfile will disable any compression that Tomcat may otherwise have performed on the response.

(bool)Boolean value, whether to use direct ByteBuffers or java mapped ByteBuffers. Default is false.
When you are using direct buffers, make sure you allocate the appropriate amount of memory for the direct memory space. On Sun's JDK that would be something like -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=256m.

(bool)Boolean value, whether to use direct ByteBuffers or java mapped ByteBuffers for the SSL buffers. If true then java.nio.ByteBuffer.allocateDirect() is used to allocate the buffers, if false then java.nio.ByteBuffer.allocate() is used. The default value is false.
When you are using direct buffers, make sure you allocate the appropriate amount of memory for the direct memory space. On Oracle's JDK that would be something like -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=256m.

(int)Each connection that is opened up in Tomcat get associated with a read ByteBuffer. This attribute controls the size of this buffer. By default this read buffer is sized at 8192 bytes. For lower concurrency, you can increase this to buffer more data. For an extreme amount of keep alive connections, decrease this number or increase your heap size.

(int)Each connection that is opened up in Tomcat get associated with a write ByteBuffer. This attribute controls the size of this buffer. By default this write buffer is sized at 8192 bytes. For low concurrency you can increase this to buffer more response data. For an extreme amount of keep alive connections, decrease this number or increase your heap size.
The default value here is pretty low, you should up it if you are not dealing with tens of thousands concurrent connections.

(int)The NIO2 connector uses a class called Nio2Channel that holds elements linked to a socket. To reduce garbage collection, the NIO2 connector caches these channel objects. This value specifies the size of this cache. The default value is 500, and represents that the cache will hold 500 Nio2Channel objects. Other values are -1 for unlimited cache and 0 for no cache.

(int)Tomcat will cache SocketProcessor objects to reduce garbage collection. The integer value specifies how many objects to keep in the cache at most. The default is 500. Other values are -1 for unlimited cache and 0 for no cache.

(int)Tomcat will cache SocketWrapper objects to reduce garbage collection. The integer value specifies how many objects to keep in the cache at most. The default is 500. Other values are -1 for unlimited cache and 0 for no cache.

(int)The NIO2 connector implements an OutOfMemoryError strategy called parachute. It holds a chunk of data as a byte array. In case of an OOM, this chunk of data is released and the error is reported. This will give the VM enough room to clean up. The oomParachute represents the size in bytes of the parachute(the byte array). The default value is 1024*1024(1MB). Please note, this only works for OOM errors regarding the Java Heap space, and there is absolutely no guarantee that you will be able to recover at all. If you have an OOM outside of the Java Heap, then this parachute trick will not help.

Sets the TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT flag on the listening socket for this connector. The default value is true where TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT is supported by the operating system, otherwise it is false.

Amount of sockets that the poller responsible for polling kept alive connections can hold at a given time. Extra connections will be closed right away. The default value is 8192, corresponding to 8192 keep-alive connections. This is a synonym for maxConnections.

Number of threads used to poll kept alive connections. On Windows the default is chosen so that the sockets managed by each thread is less than 1024. For Linux the default is 1. Changing the default on Windows is likely to have a negative performance impact.

Duration of a poll call in microseconds. Lowering this value will slightly decrease latency of connections being kept alive in some cases, but will use more CPU as more poll calls are being made. The default value is 2000 (2ms).

Amount of sockets that the poller responsible for sending static files asynchronously can hold at a given time. Extra connections will be closed right away without any data being sent (resulting in a zero length file on the client side). Note that in most cases, sendfile is a call that will return right away (being taken care of "synchronously" by the kernel), and the sendfile poller will not be used, so the amount of static files which can be sent concurrently is much larger than the specified amount. The default value is 1024.

Number of threads used service sendfile sockets. On Windows the default is chosen so that the sockets managed by each thread is less than 1024. For Linux the default is 1. Changing the default on Windows is likely to have a negative performance impact.

(int)The priority of the acceptor and poller threads. The default value is 5 (the value of the java.lang.Thread.NORM_PRIORITY constant). See the JavaDoc for the java.lang.Thread class for more details on what this priority means.

(bool)Whether to allow comet servlets or not. Default value is true.

(bool)Use this attribute to enable or disable sendfile capability. The default value is true. Note that the use of sendfile will disable any compression that Tomcat may otherwise have performed on the response.