There is a setting in struts that will definitely speed up the struts
application. Looking up values from ApplicationResources.properties is
very expensive as it scans all the packages to find the value in
individual .property files (it goes up the chain), and then if it cannot
find it gets it from the default ApplicationResources.properties.
Internally this will be thousands of calls to a method to check for the
value..
As roller only uses ApplicationResources.properties you can check this
file first and then if it does not find it do the package scanning thing.
struts.i18n.search.defaultbundles.first=true
This will bring back struts 1 performance (if you can remember that far
back), how great it was.
For v7 it is worth investigating.