Google is giving me too many different answers! I need to serve a single webapp to a lot of people with acceptable latency. There's no need for multiple contexts or any other funkines. Tomcat 6, JVM 1.6x. I have a hardware load balancer and two 64-bit machines (Windows 2003 Server--not my choice, yes I'd have preferred Linux) each with two CPUs and 8GB RAM.
I also have a consultant who insists we need to set up at least two, possibly more, instances of Tomcat on each machine for good performance. I'm more inclined to think that a single instance with tuned Java options will provide the same performance, but be easier to set up and maintain. If I needed to serve different webapps or somehow needed to separate things for some reason, I could see it, but given just the one app/context. it seems like multiple instances really amounts to second-guessing the OS scheduler. Also notable: the servers are VMs. Anyway, I'd appreciate advice, and I don't mind being wrong if you need to side with the consultant. If it needs to be complicated to go fast, then that's what we'll do... Ideally, I'd try both ways and hit it with JMeter, but I lack the time and resources (because mgmt spent the money on our consultant). So I must beg for answers here... Thanks in advance. J
