Re: Overwhelming a Web Application Server

Pete Helgren skrev:

My experience, so far, is that all of the session handling/management of the servlet container is adequate for what I need. But in my case, I don't have thousands, or even hundreds of concurrent hits so perhaps my lack of attention to this particular area will come back to haunt me if I get hundreds or thousands of users (a problem I look forward to).

For a servlet container a newcomer is Ajax as these usually work by having a connection continously open from the browser to the web container. This may cause your web server to run out of resources.

Apparently this will be a part of the 3.0 servlet specification. Until then, Jetty have an unspellable facility for this

http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Continuations

I keep the session timeout value relatively low so that sessions expire and are GC'ed on a regular basis and, although I think that I don't carry too much information around in the session itself, this thread has reminded me that I need to profile my servlet on Tomcat and see how it performs, especially when it comes to memory utilization.

Have a look at jvisualvm in the Sun JDK. It works well when testing locally on your pc.

It has been a good discussion, and timely.

Pete

I'd again advocate the "Release It!" book by Michael Nygard. Lots of tips from the front line.