floater wrote:

question regarding to #3.

What connection pool are you using with tomcat? Do you have load balancer, server clustering? Do you have any firewall, SSO setting in front of them?

>> the jdbc pooling is from jakarta commons, you can check, before that, i was using one from third party, but it could not last for a few months (3-4) then gave errors so i wrote my own, it is not that difficult. No real load balancing besides the tomcat connector so I did run multiple tomcat instances, if the project allows to buy a load balance solution, the budget is enough to buy any commerical appliation server. Yes, definitely there is a firewall behind.

Which specific famous application servers are embedded with tomcat?

>> I think Sun application server is using Tomcat, Borland Application Server, JBoss too and some applications, they may not be announced in public. But when you use you have the feeling.

Apparently you are not using JTA, JCA, JMS, EJB, etc, I assume. Correct me if I am wrong.

>> yes, for most applications (small to medium), JSP/Servlet is good and suitable enough, you must read the books from Spring autoher. And if you really need JTA/JCA/JMS/etc, it is still possible, just need to do homework and take more time, of coz, in that case tomcat is not so easy as commercial product as you pay money. So many commercial and big sites are based on ASP/PHP, so why not Java/JSP/Servlet? Java allows us to do almost everything not because of JTA/JCA/JMS/EJB. I lead a few very big EJB projects (millions US$) but to be honest 80%+ of EJB projects failed (from my view of coz). Expert books does have a lot of deep thougts that comes from true experience not just paper/document. That is another topic.

Are you using apache http server or similar in the front for the static resources?

>> yes, apache is so powerful.

You meaning concurrent hits >50? for how long? What's the total hit per day, per month, in average? How long can the servers be up continuously?

What's the throughtput per request?

>> I dont have to statistics to show (as it s not my interest and job) but they are commercial sites so I m sure and not lying. The server is up until sb turns it down ~_~, it is linux/unix machine. Sometimes after upate the application, tomcat needs to restart.

Tomcat was originally the RI, but I expect over the time it could get improvements on performance. So I just ask some questions to compare with commercial servers, like weblogic, websphere, etc.

>>Tomcat definitely shines it is not just RI, from version 3.x it can compete with anybody in terms of Java Web container, thats my experience.