JSP and Tomcat running verrrrrrryyyyyy sllllooooooowwwwwwwwwww

I've had Apache and Tomcat running on my 270 (www.vamanet.com site) for
2 years now.  I use Servlets and .JSPs for the shopping cart system and
it works fine. 

I'm beginning a new Servlets project so I set up a new webapp in
Tomcat.  Currently there is 1 .JSP in the directory and I have two
problems:

1) The new webapp is HORRIBLY slow.  Go to
http://www.vamanet.com/suite/test.jsp and you'll see what I mean... 15+
seconds.  The code couldn't be simpler:

The body tags of the .jsp include only the following:

<ul>
  <li>Current time: <%= new java.util.Date() %></li>
  <li>Your hostname: <%= request.getRemoteHost() %></li>
  <li>Your session ID: <%= session.getId() %></li>
</ul>

The shopping cart system I have running in another webapp on the same
machine performs fine... any ideas why this one is so slow???

2) Getting the .JSP page to find the appropriate .CSS file seems to be a
challenge.  Imagine the following directory structure:

/www
        /server
                /htdocs
                /webapps
                        /info
                        /cart
                        /suite

In order for the site to find the correct .CSS, I have to put it in the
htdocs folder.  I have tried to place it in the /suite webapp directory,
but it won't find it.  I tried relative URLs and even an absolute URL,
but the page never reflects the CSS.  If I put it in htdocs, however, it
finds it.  The strange thing is that if I put it in /suite and point a
browser to the absolute URL it finds it correctly.

Is there any way to have the CSS file reside in the related webapp
sub-directory?

Thanks,

Joel Cochran
http://www.rpgnext.com