2016-08-27 Saturday - Apache Tomcat / TomEE start-up takes forever

I've just installed Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M9 and Apache TomEE 7.0.1 today - and encountered a curious issue with the start-up taking forever (for either one) - well, at least longer than a minute...

Some folks report much longer "hang" times...

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29355258/tomcat-taking-too-long-to-initialize

I've also installed Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M9 on a different laptop (Windows 7) - and the start-up is normal (~1+ second)

On my primary development laptop (MSI, Windows 10, Java 1.8.0_102-b14) - the start-up takes ~1 minute+

I happened across this article:

• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/understanding-tomcat-nio-connector-how-configure-tiziano-di-gennaro

which suggested changing the protocol from "HTTP/1.1" to "org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"

Problem solved - for now - until I have time to dig into this more and determine root cause.

Some folks have suggested this problem is due to a lack of entropy in the OS...

• http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/HowTo/FasterStartUp#Entropy_Source
• "Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom" 
• "replacing the blocking entropy source (/dev/random) with a non-blocking one actually reduces security because you are getting less-random data"
• http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/89/feeding-dev-random-entropy-pool
• http://www.labouisse.com/misc/2014/06/19/tomcat-startup-time-surprises 
• https://support.run.pivotal.io/entries/59869725-Java-Web-Applications-Slow-Startup-or-Failing
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20315022/java-slow-entropy-related-issue

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28201794/slow-startup-on-tomcat-7-0-57-because-of-securerandom

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/137212/how-to-solve-performance-problem-with-java-securerandom/2325109#2325109
• "if you want a cryptographically strong random number in Java, you use SecureRandom. Unfortunately, SecureRandom can be very slow"

• https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/fresh-tomcat-takes-loong-time-to-start-up

Given the above, the recent Python 3.6 release included a change that caught my eye

• PEP 524 -- Make os.urandom() blocking on Linux 
• https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0524/