Performance within Tomcat issue

[Mario Felarca <ge...@yahoo.com>]

Hello,

I have a quick question and I was looking for any insights or ideas to try. 
I am running Tomcat 3.3.1 with the JRE 1.3.1_03 server vm, and Xalan-J 2.4D1.

I wrote a small test program that performs a couple of transforms on some 
data that I have that happens to be a decent size. This transforms it in 
about 40 seconds each for the first pass, and usually 16 and 26 seconds 
each for the subsequent iterations.

When I am run the same two transforms from within a servlet running under 
Tomcat, it takes an unbelievably long time. We are talking on the order of 
6-8 min. for the first transform, and 2-3 min for the second one.

For further clarification, the transformers are always derived from a 
Templates object. The system is a P3-800 with 256 MB of memory. When I run 
my test program, it sucks nerely 100% CPU for the whole time, and chews a 
healthy amount of memory. When I run from tomcat, it spikes the CPU to 
varying levels but never chews it consistently, while at the same time 
consuming apparently a bit less memory (or quickly gc'ing the memory).

In both cases, the Java heap is set to minimum 128 and maximum 512.

I would expect the time under the servlet to be a bit slower, primarily 
because there are other things that I am doing there that I am not doing in 
my test program, but these numbers are downright painful.

Any experiences with similar situations, ideas, thoughts, or pointers would 
be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

Mario-