Looking for the convenience of using Tomcat in a high volume, mission critical site I’ve found some references that may be useful to other people:
Clustering and Load Balancing in Tomcat 5. Part 1
Clustering and Load Balancing in Tomcat 5. Part 2
The book Professional Apache Tomcat 5 (Programmer to Programmer) seems interesting too, with chapters “Server Load Testing” and “Clustering”.
The only benchmark I’d found is Jakarta Tomcat Performance Benchmark at TSS but it’s from march 2003, very outdated. When trying to convince a boss to use Tomcat it’d be interesting real world success stories and benchmarks.
Carlos Sanchez's Weblog
software at the end of the universe
Carlos Sanchez's Weblog 
We, University of Florida, have a simple load balancing Tomcat cluster for our webmail.ufl.edu .Our stats generation are a little out of wack right now but picking a recent day: http://webstats.ufl.edu/webmail.ufl.edu/daily-2004-10-08.html you’ll see during the busiest hour we handled 53.6 request per second. We have 4 servers running apache httpd (hosting many sites) and the requests for webmail.ufl.edu get forwarded via mod_jk to one of 4 machines running tomcat. IMO the only negative is we don’t have any unified admin console, we simply ssh into each box and manage each tomcat clone separately.
Thanks Sandy, that’s the kind of info that I think will boost the use of open source solutions in the business world.
Could you please post the hardware configuration?
The apache httpd boxes are running AIX on dual cpu PowerPC. The tomcat clones are running Gentoo Linux on dual P4. All the boxes have between 2 to 4 gigs of ram. The linux boxes are kinda new (less than a year old) and the AIX boxes would be at least 2 years old. Sorry I don’t have exact specs easily available, also there is hardware which I’m not telling you about because it isn’t directly related to our tomcat stuff and would only slow performance down such as file systems over NFS. I’m not sure I’d recommend Gentoo for running productions JVMs on. We’ve had some JVM stability problems that I think may be related to combinations of linux/glibc/etc that the JVMs (from Sun or IBM) aren’t tested with.
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