potential load from virtual hosts

[Duane Gran <ra...@spinweb.net>]

I read through the FAQ, and in particular the documentation in CVS and noticed 
something about Virtual Hosting and Tomcat.  It appears that you need an 
entirely separate JVM instance.

On one hand this is good, because you isolate problems from each Virtual Host, 
but on the other hand it poses some problems for scalability.  A typical JVM 
will occupy 16-32mb of RAM at a time, so this is a burden.  Our system is a 
Sun E250 with 256mb of RAM.

We have roughly 25 Virtual Hosts for our servlet hosting and the service is 
growing rapidly.  We currently use JServ, but we want to transition to Tomcat 
in order to have JSP and all the other goodies that Tomcat offers.

Can anyone shed some light on this quandry?  Should we wait for Tomcat to 
offer a shared JVM environment, or am I overestimating the load that separate 
JVMs would impose?

Duane Gran
spinweb.net