We have about 1,900 students and faculty, and we create web space for
all of them automatically. I'm interested in Tomcat-enabling their web
space and have been testing it on a test server. There are approximately
1,900 username.xml files in /webapps/.
The problem is that it takes Tomcat 15-20 minutes to completely start
(at 90%+ CPU utilization) as it looks at each xml file in webapps, and
by then it's using ~200MB. I can give it more memory if needed, but the
startup time is the real problem.
Partitioning the webapps across multiple JVMs won't really work since
each JVM would then have a proportionately smaller chunk of the CPUs.
I'd hate to use multiple servers since we have plenty of horsepower for
everything except the startup it seems (2x850MHz PIII's, 1GB RAM).
Are there smarter approaches to this? I've thought about using a just a
single with the parent of the user webs being the docbase, but how do I
approach users who want to use their own classes and jars?
Any suggestions are appreciated!
