The slowdown I was reporting seems to have become more repeatable. This
is good, because it meant I could track down (though not fix - I don't
know the tomcat code nearly well enough) the problem. It's also not so
good, because it MAY be that there are actually two problems.
It turns out that the hosts which were seeing a huge slowdown didn't
have any dns entries (they're internal to our network), and weren't in
my /etc/hosts. As soon as I added a host to /etc/hosts (on the server),
the problem stopped (for that host only). This is with a tomcat 4.0
snapshot from today, but I didn't try using the http/1.0 connector (I
can still do this if you think it'd be useful, Remy).
So, my guess is that it's trying to reverse-resolve the host, and just
waiting until it times out for some reason (logging, perhaps?). I'd
still consider this a serious bug, but a somewhat less crucial one since
there's an easy workaround for it.
However, the symptoms here were entirely reproducible - the original
problem was not. So I think there may be a second problem - if so, I'll
let you know, but it may not be terribly soon because of the fact that
it isn't reproducible. For the moment, I think it's safe to assume that
it was just the single problem.
Michael
