Tomcat Performance question

[Sean Golden <se...@earthlink.net>]

Hello:

I am a new member of this mailing list.  I have been developing in 
Tomcat for about three months now and have produced an application I am 
getting ready to deploy to production.

The application consists of three servlets, as described below:

1. Input servlet which responds to a "get" request and uses xalan to 
merge an xml and an xsl file into an html input screen and then receives 
the post response to create an xml file on the server.

2. Admin servlet which allows an admin person to view the response to 
the first servlet for the purpose of approving the file for processing.  
This also uses xalan to create an htlm approval screen.  Upon approval 
the xml file is merged with an existing larger xml file of previously 
approved responses.

3.  Admin servlet which allows the admin person to "publish" the xml 
data into a seris of html pages which are stored in the servlet 
directory on the server.

A pretty simple system actually.  The html is then available for pure 
html browsing.

My problem is that my sys admin person who needs to deploy this system 
on a production box is concerned that Tomcat cannot be performant enough 
to satisfy the high volume of requests on the server.  He is convinced 
that Tomcat is loaded every time anyone accesses the html, even if they 
do not access the servlets themselves.  I suggested configuring Tomcat 
to use Apache as the html server, and he agreed but came back and said 
the same thing.  Even with Apache as the web server the Tomcat overhead 
kills performance.

I don't think this is right.  I think he is confused.  But maybe I am.  
I need someone to help me understand if he is right, or if Tomcat is 
capable of being used in a production high-volume environment.

One more point.  These servlets must be in a secure environment.  They 
use a Thawte certificate for security.  I thought Tomcat could be 
configured to use a secure certificate fairly simply, but he says 
otherwise.

Any help would be appreciated.  I can refer him directly to someone who 
would like to help him through this if anyone would like to help him 
directly.

Thanks in advance.

-sdg


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AW: Tomcat Performance question

["Power-Netz (Schwarz)" <sc...@power-netz.de>]

> One more point.  These servlets must be in a secure environment.  They
> > use a Thawte certificate for security.  I thought Tomcat could be
> > configured to use a secure certificate fairly simply, but he says
> > otherwise.

Thawte certs can be used with tomcat, just the installation of the cert is
a bit problematic --> http://www.comu.de/docs/tomcat_ssl.htm

> Yes. Anyway I'd suggest to always use Apache as the frontend (handling
> as well the SSL stuff) and then connect tomcat with AJP12/13 to the
> apache.

Maybe I did something wrong with mod_jk but,
since I split Apache from Tomcat again, we got a huge performance increase
on
the tomcat side. Now Apache handles http and Tomcat handles https.
Since "our" webapp needs secure auth anyway, we use tomcat for the whole
process.
IMHO, noone will run into trouble if he/she uses tomcat without apache.

The only problem i can see is, that tomcat 3.3.x is unable to use different
sslcerts for different vhosts.
Can anyone pls verify this? Or better not ;-))





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Re: Tomcat Performance question

[Henner Zeller <he...@freiheit.com>]

Hi Sean,

> My problem is that my sys admin person who needs to deploy this system 
> on a production box is concerned that Tomcat cannot be performant enough 
> to satisfy the high volume of requests on the server.  He is convinced 
> that Tomcat is loaded every time anyone accesses the html, even if they 
> do not access the servlets themselves.

No, tomcat is already started. The tomcat process is running, waiting for 
requests. Each requests is passed to an already spawned and waiting 
thread. So handling a request is pretty fast. Tomcat behaves like a normal 
webserver in this regard: started and waiting for requests.
Even the servlets inside Tomcat are started once at startup and then 
are reused on every request in a separate thread.

HTML-serving is just another servlet in tomcat, that just reads a file and 
passes it to the servlet output stream.

I assume your admin compares tomcat to CGI-programs. CGI-progams (mostly 
written in Perl, thus often referred to as CGI-script) are started every 
time a request goes to them; this indeed is not good for performance, 
especially for scripts that need to start-up a huge interpreter that needs 
to parse its script first.

> One more point.  These servlets must be in a secure environment.  They 
> use a Thawte certificate for security.  I thought Tomcat could be 
> configured to use a secure certificate fairly simply, but he says 
> otherwise.

Yes. Anyway I'd suggest to always use Apache as the frontend (handling 
as well the SSL stuff) and then connect tomcat with AJP12/13 to the 
apache.

ciao,
 -hen


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