architecting large sites

[J Doe <ib...@yahoo.com>]

Hello,

I'm looking for pointers to docs/books on how to scale
Tomcat.  For simplicity, let's assume that there is a
single webapp that is basically on the order of a
Cocoon/Jetspeed application, with no DB connections
per se, but pulling information from some other web
sources (e.g. syndication).

Suppose that a site needs to support 1500+
simultaneous users. (Quite large, yes).

I'm no expert in web-site architecture, but it strikes
me that there are 2 or 3 possibilities to this
problem: (a) multiple machines, using a load-balancer,
 (b) multiple instances of Apache/Tomcat on a given
machine(s), and (c) beefing up each machine with max
memory and possibly more CPUs.

Is there a ballpark estimate for the max number of
simultaneous users for a single machine with
Apache/Tomcat?  I'm guessing this will be far less
than 1500.  Given that, what's the "next-best" way to
boost that number?   Would having multiple CPUs be
effective?  Can there actually be multiple instances
of Tomcat on a single machine?  If so, does that help
address this issue?

I realize these questions are vague and deal with a
huge scope, but I'm looking for doc sources or "best
practices", rather than concrete answers.

thanks,
Mike

ps. Does anyone know of some "large" sites that use
Apache/Tomcat?  I'm trying to get a sense if 1500+ is
even possible, or if it has been attempted. 

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