Logging configuration is different

- Admin and JMX are secured (some versions also in all, default ...)

- Connection and Statement tracking is off (because of sync contention)

- A special run.conf located in server/production/conf

- Archives are different (I've suppose less debug information, but it looks like not)

Available Services looks like exact same.

Also, it appears that you have downloaded EAP 5, not AS 5. EAP 5 contains the 'production' configuration while AS 5 does not. EAP 5 is the version you get with a support contract from Red Hat.

just a small one, but the EAP "production" instance uses the ASYNC appender for logging and the "all" instance uses the standard FILE appender. There's other differences in jboss-log4j.xml that are interesting (i found the examples in those files a great way to learn about log4j).

Also ... here's a nifty little use of cmp that i cooked up to see differences when we do upgrades. So, running from the top of the PRODUCTION profile:

find . -type f -name \*.xml | xargs -i cmp {} ../all/{}

Which in the case of EAP yields ...

cmp: ../all/./data/farm-repository-contents.xml: No such file or directory
cmp: ../all/./deploy/mod-cluster.sar/META-INF/mod-cluster-jboss-beans.xml: No such file or directory
./deploy/properties-service.xml ../all/./deploy/properties-service.xml differ: byte 1564, line 52
./deploy/uuid-key-generator.sar/META-INF/jboss-service.xml ../all/./deploy/uuid-key-generator.sar/META-INF/jboss-service.xml differ: byte 1851, line 42
./deploy/hdscanner-jboss-beans.xml ../all/./deploy/hdscanner-jboss-beans.xml differ: byte 114, line 6
./deploy/jbossweb.sar/server.xml ../all/./deploy/jbossweb.sar/server.xml differ: byte 402, line 9
./deploy/jbossweb.sar/META-INF/jboss-beans.xml ../all/./deploy/jbossweb.sar/META-INF/jboss-beans.xml differ: byte 415, line 9
./deploy/jca-jboss-beans.xml ../all/./deploy/jca-jboss-beans.xml differ: byte 2186, line 48
./deployers/ear-deployer-jboss-beans.xml ../all/./deployers/ear-deployer-jboss-beans.xml differ: byte 2615, line 57

The ASYNC appender is a bit faster than the FILE one, also less locking (sync) contention to the application.

But the drawback is that in case of massive logging and failures you might lost ptintouts.