Is this very likely to create a memory leak in Tomcat?

The message is actually pretty clear: something creates a ThreadLocal with value of type org.apache.axis.MessageContext – this is a great hint. It most likely means that Apache Axis framework forgot/failed to cleanup after itself. The same problem occurred for instance in Logback. You shouldn’t bother much, but reporting a bug to Axis team might be a good idea.

Tomcat reports this error because the ThreadLocals are created per HTTP worker threads. Your application is undeployed but HTTP threads remain – and these ThreadLocals as well. This may lead to memory leaks (org.apache.axis.MessageContext can’t be unloaded) and some issues when these threads are reused in the future.

For details see: http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/MemoryLeakProtection

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