The Executor (thread pool)

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Executor represents a thread pool that can be shared between components in Tomcat. Historically there has been a thread pool per connector created but this allows you to share a thread pool, between (primarly) connector but also other components when those get configured to support executors

The executor has to implement the org.apache.catalina.Executor interface.

The executor is a nested element to the Service element. And in order for it to be picked up by the connectors, the Executor element has to appear prior to the Connector element in server.xml

Attributes

Common Attributes

All implementations of Executor support the following attributes:

Attribute Description
className

The class of the implementation. The implementation has to implement the org.apache.catalina.Executor interface. This interface ensures that the object can be referenced through its name attribute and that implements Lifecycle, so that it can be started and stopped with the container. The default value for the className is org.apache.catalina.core.StandardThreadExecutor

name

The name used to reference this pool in other places in server.xml. The name is required and must be unique.

Standard Implementation

The default implementation supports the following attributes:

Attribute Description
threadPriority

(int) The thread priority for threads in the executor, the default is 5 (the value of the Thread.NORM_PRIORITY constant)

daemon

(boolean) Whether the threads should be daemon threads or not, the default is true

namePrefix

(String) The name prefix for each thread created by the executor. The thread name for an individual thread will be namePrefix+threadNumber

maxThreads

(int) The max number of active threads in this pool, default is 200

minSpareThreads

(int) The minimum number of threads always kept alive, default is 25

maxIdleTime

(int) The number of milliseconds before an idle thread shutsdown, unless the number of active threads are less or equal to minSpareThreads. Default value is 60000(1 minute)

maxQueueSize

(int) The maximum number of runnable tasks that can queue up awaiting execution before we reject them. Default value is Integer.MAX_VALUE

prestartminSpareThreads

(boolean) Whether minSpareThreads should be started when starting the Executor or not, the default is false

threadRenewalDelay

After a context is stopped, threads in the pool are renewed. To avoid renewing all threads at the same time, this delay is observed between 2 threads being renewed. Value is in ms, default value is 1000ms. If negative, threads are not renewed.

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