THIS IS ARCHIVE DOCUMENTATION FOR TERRACOTTA v. 3.0. For the current release, see the current DSO documentation »

Release: 3.0.1
Publish Date: May, 2009

Technical FAQ

Can I run Terracotta as a Microsoft Windows service?

While running an application as a Microsoft Windows service has many advantages, such as scheduling and automatic start and restart, there is no official supported configuration for doing this with Terracotta. However, there are solutions available that have been tried successfully, including some with Java Service Wrapper. This blog entry includes a short procedure.

Try an Internet search on "windows java service" to find other possible solutions and articles.

How can my application check that Terracotta is alive at runtime?

Your application can check to see if the system property tc.active is true. For example, the following life of code would return true if Terracotta is active at the time it is run:

Boolean.getBoolean("tc.active");

Is there a maximum number of objects that can be held by one Terracotta server instance?

The number of objects that can be held by a Terracotta server instance is two billion, a limit imposed by the design of Java collections. It is unlikely that a Terracotta cluster will need to approach even 50 percent of that maximum. However, if it does, other issues may arise that require the rearchitecting of how application data is handled in the cluster.

I know Ubuntu isn't a supported platform, but do you have any advice for running Terracotta on it?

The known issues when trying to run Terracotta on Ubuntu are:

• Default shell is dash bash. Terracotta scripts don't behave under dash. You might solve this issue by setting your default shell to bash or changing /bin/sh in our scripts to /bin/bash.

• The Ubuntu default JDK is from GNU. Terracotta supports only the Sun JDKs.

• See the UnknownHostException in the Troubleshooting Guide.