Need solution to webapp errors from Tomcat trying to log events after logger has been disposed

Question

Enviroment: JSF 2.0, RichFaces 3.3.3, Facelets 1.1.15B1, Spring Framework 3.x, WebFlow 2.1, MyBatis 3.0.1, Oracle 10/11 g backend, SLF4j into Log4j. Well thats probably TMI since my issue is only a logging problem but better to be too thorough than not.

Anyways... I just setup SLF4j & log4j so now all of the internal facelets log msgs are being dumped into log4j & I can actually see them. In addition I setup Tomcat to also dump to log4j instead of it's custom version of JULI. Upon doing this everything appeared to be working great.... until i shut down the app.

Midway through the shutdown process my app started barfing up errors left 'n right because (which makes sense) Tomcat is trying to grab a logger instance AFTER spring has already cleaned up the logger bean.

Anyone familiar with this? I imagine it must be a common problem for anyone who has Tomcat using the non-standard logging mechanism. What is the best way around this?

I thought maybe if I just raised the log level then Tomcat wouldn't even try to log msgs because of the level req.s but the problem occurs when tomcat is trying to retrieve a logger instance so that didn't work.

Answer 1

I would move the Logger higher in the food chain.

I personally never configured log4j with spring relying on its own configuration mechanism (and hunting for where the heck it finds the properties file it is using in the process).

If you can you can opt to completely remove log4j from your war and rely on the log4j in the common tomcat library classpath. Then of course you are at the mercy of the tomcat configuration and you cannot access the log from inside your app, but it is always there during the complete lifecycle of your app.