Deployment question

[rnappert]

In order to deplay a load-balanced application, the war files gets copied in the all/farm directory and the application will be duplicated across all of the nodes in the cluster.

I've read somewhere that applications war files should be manually deleted from the farm directory, if the node was taken out from the cluster. So, my question is: What harm does it if I leave this war file in the farm directory? It looks like that the application gets correctly deployed. So, why should it be removed. If this works, why not use the farm directory in general to deploy applications?

Thanks,

-Reinhard

[wdfink]

For me there are two things:

- hotdeploy might be a problem (maybe only 5.x or earlier) with classloding and PermGen size, often deploy does not unload all classes

- hotdeploy looks strange and critical because if you touch one file the complete application might be restarted

- farming sounds to some administrator/customer like 'uncontrolable' because the app will restart imediately for all instances

Often a 'controlable' deplyoment is prefered in a productional environment.

If you take a node out of the cluster the farm directory is not removed (because it is not longer a cluster member ), so I suppose this is the meaning.

But if you take it out from the cluster the application should be unreacable anyway if you remove it from loadbalancing also.