> Why would separate instances require their own jar files? Is it not possible > to point two concurrently executing jvm's at the same set of jar files? >
It is entirely possible, of course. But you'll have some maintenance work to do if ever you wish to change the jars for _one_ Tomcat installation among many. Yes, but is there a technical, i.e. JVM, reason that two running instances of tomcat can't concurrently use the same shared libraries?
