Tomcat 4.1.3 on Win2k Server: Context reloading itself, but no changes were made; why?

[Eric B <mi...@gmail.com>]

 Hi, all.

I've got an odd situation with one of our applications that runs under
Tomcat.  The application will occasionally stop responding to incoming
requests, and I believe I've traced the issue to a problem with Context
reloads.  Several times a day, the Tomcat log file indicates that the
application context is reloading, and then indicates that the reload was
successful.  Occasionally, though, the reload fails, and the log files fill
up with error messages like the following:

StandardWrapperValve[action]: Servlet action is currently unavailable

Once the Tomcat windows service is bounced, the application runs fine.

Now, I've looked through the Tomcat documentation, and it seems that the
intermittent reloads are related to how our application's <Context> is
declared in the server configuration, with reloadable="true".
Unfortunately, the previous keepers of this application are long gone, so I
haven't been able to find out why a Production application is setup like
this.  When we deploy new builds (which is very infrequently), we always
stop the Tomcat service, so the reloadable option seems to be unnecessary.
This leads to my first question:

1. What will we lose by setting reloadable="false"?

Moreover, my understanding of the "Context is reloading" messages is that
Tomcat thinks that some of our application's class components have changed,
so it's reloading the application to take advantage of new code.  We haven't
made any changes; all of the modification time stamps on the files I've
found are dated from several months or weeks ago.  This leads to my second
question:

2. How does Tomcat interpret that a change has happened?  Is it a file
compare?  Date check?

Thank you very much for the assistance!

Regards,
Eric B