Optimize your Apache Geronimo release

Deactivate unnecessary out-of-the-box applications and services to save time and enhance security

Apache Geronimo is known for its scalability, using GBeans, which allows developers to plug and play any services and WEB applications they need. But Apache Geronimo out-of-the-box distributions provide services for listening ports and starting application modules, including WEB applications, which can take up a lot of resources and may expose your application to the threat of intruders. This article describes how to stop and restart listening and application services, and how to undeploy and redeploy individual application modules and WEB applications as needed, effectively adjusting the deployment of the Apache Geronimo release to include only the core services and applications necessary.

Brief introduction

Apache Geronimo Each version has increased usability, with applications and services preloaded in the available downloads (stock download) also increasing. While the value is obvious, each enhancement will also significantly increase the startup time of Geronimo, allowing you to wait longer when you stop and restart Geronimo. You might think that as long as you don't use those services, they won't have an impact on your computer, but that's not the case. Services and applications are actually running, listening, and waiting for Geronimo to take their time, thus occupying valuable CPU clock cycles and memory transistors.

Geronimo schema
The architectural underpinnings of Apache Geronimo include the Geronimo javabeans™ (that is, GBeans). GBeans is a custom JavaBean used by the Geronimo application server, and some GBeans contain components that form the kernel of Geronimo. GBeans can be used to maintain or not maintain state, GBeans interact with each other to effectively create the Geronimo kernel.

Faster boot speeds and reduced memory usage are not the only reasons to create a custom Geronimo release. For example, if you intend to use Geronimo as a real-time application server, you must not want any WEB applications or services that you do not need or use to run on Geronimo. Shutting down unwanted services will lead to a more secure environment, with fewer applications and services for potential intruders to pry into. The more exposed services, the more "portals" a potential intruder acquires access to.

This article shows you how to stop unnecessary applications and services, and how to restart them later if needed. You will learn how to customize the existing (stock) Apache Geronimo release to load only those WEB applications and system services that need to be run when you boot and run this release. Eventually Geronimo will run in a more secure configuration and environment, while the processor and memory will be more efficiently utilized.

Start learning

First, you need to download the latest version of Apache Geronimo V1.0 from apache.org and extract it into a directory--the following will be called <geronimo-install-dir>.

Apache Geronimo is written in the Java™ programming language, and it is important to download and install the Sun's Java runtime environment. Because Geronio is Java 1.4 certified, it is recommended that 1.4.09 or later (but should be less than 1.5 version).

To ensure that all prerequisite software is properly installed, type the following command to start the Apache Geronimo application:

Java-jar <geronimo-install-dir>/bin/server.jar

Now it is all ready for the study of this article. Next, start Geronimo and view the initial statistics for the setup of Geronimo.

Commonly used Geronimo statistics

First look at the initial boot time and memory consumption of Apache Geronimo. Figure 1 shows the time spent in the apache.org download boot.

Figure 1. The number of seconds that Geronimo starts