Running Jenkins standalone vs within Tomcat
What things should be considered when deciding between running Jenkins standalone or within Tomcat? We would prefer to not have to use Tomcat because there's no other applications on this server machine that would need Tomcat, so we would be setting up and maintaining another application just for Jenkins.
But there must be some advantages to running Jenkins within Tomcat, otherwise why wouldn't everyone choose to run it standalone (because it's easier to set up and maintain standalone), so what are those advantages? What will we be missing by going standalone and not using Tomcat?
Does the size of the Jenkins installation factor into the decision? i.e. after a certain number of jobs/builds or load is it necessary to move from one to the other, or are both tiny and massive Jenkins installations equally valid candidates for both options?
Jenkins standalone uses the Winstone servlet engine, so in some ways this question is also about Winstone vs Tomcat.
Solution 1:
We are running Jenkins using the default Winstone engine behind nGinx (to handle our SSL and port 8080 to 80 redirect) and have zero issues with performance. It seems that when using ant build scripts everything runs outside of java/Jenkins so the built in web server is not a hindrance.
I did a quick Google search and found this thread that points out the pros and cons of running with the built in server (WinStone) vs TomCat. tomcat v/s builtin winstone container