A problem and some questions

["Dale, Matt" <Ma...@beCogent.com>]

Hi,

The problem is we need to deploy an application to 3-400 users. Currently the application is being used by significantly less users on a reasonably beefy machine but that machine is really the server for something else so we'd like to get tomcat off of it.

Our plan is to use several single processor machines but the question would be how the users would access these. So my questions are below.

Obviously clustering the tomcats would be a good option, my one question on this would be, do the sessions have to be fully serializable to be shared across the tomcat instances?

Another option would be to load balance using either the built in tomcat load balancer or the JK2 connector. My question here would be, is either of these stateful, ie do they keep track of which tomcat a particular user is using.

Also pros and cons of either of these methods would be appreciated.

Thanks
Matt