Tomcat: Getting 404 before the container starts all servlets

Question

After upgrading Tomcat from 6.X to 7.X, our AJAX client receives 404 for 10-15 seconds right after startup. I presume the request is accepted and processed before all servlet are initialized, which is not what you
would expect.

Is this behavior normal for 7.X? Is there a way to configure 7.x to behave like 6.x?

Comments

Look at the bindOnInit attribute for  elements:
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/http.html#Standard_Implementation

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I tried with bindOnInit=false and bindOnInit=true, it makes no difference. I'm using tomcat 7.0.34, would this option be available in 7.0.34?

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It should be. Note that the Tomcat you're using is over a year old, so you might want to consider upgrading, regardless. Lots of things fixed since then.

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I tried with 7.0.47 and I still get 404 regardless of the the state of bindOnInit.

Answer 1

Tomcat doesn't serve *any* requests until everything (including applications) has started up. bindOnInit only controls when it starts accepting connections.

You should only see any response (including 404s) once all the applications have reported that they have started.

From what you describe it appears that your application is continuing to do some initialisation after it has reported it is started.

Servlets do use lazy init by default but a request to a servlet should not complete until after the servlet has finished initialising.

All the indications are that the 404s you are seeing are a result of how your application is designed.