Dear all - This is my first post to the list and I'm posting because I have a truly bizarre context-related performance problem which I have been unable to resolve.
I'm running a set of Java 1.3 webapps in Tomcat 4.1.27 in an AIX (64 bit) environment. Each context has a "/Test" servlet which simply displays the contents of a properties file. For all but one of the webapps this servlet finishes processing within a few (less than 10) milliseconds as expected. However, for one of the contexts this servlet takes 400-500ms to finish. Other servlets in this context are also very much slower than similar servlets running in other contexts. The really weird part is that if I put a copy of the code for another context's "Test" servlet into the slow context's WEB-INF/classes directory and add an entry for it to web.xml the slow context suddenly speeds up and runs at a satisfactory speed! This is despite the fact that there is no interdependency between these two webapps. I can't find any exceptions or debug info in any logs to explain why the context is running slowly without this extra code. What I don't understand is why dropping some essentially redundant code from another webapp should make the slightest bit of difference to the performance of a webapp. To further spice up the mix, this problem does not exist in a Linux installation of the same webapps...! Any ideas would be most welcome. Thanks. Robbie Baldock
