Is anything wrong with Tomcat?

[Stanley Tan]

I've heard before that Tomcat is slow and there are some other problems with it. Is this true?

[Lee Xu]

I don't hear anybody else to mention this.

[Stanley Tan]

Oh, cuz I heard before that Caucho's Resin is much better...

[ted oniger]

Hi, there's nothing wrong with Tomcat. It's just that it is not that user friendly when displaying an exception or error in your servlet.
It's better to have two runners installed in your system. I use Tomcat and Resin. Between the two, Resin is faster and friendlier in telling where in your code causes the error.

[Stanley Tan]

Hi Ted,
What do you mean by two runners on the system? Two serving the same pages?

[shailesh sonavadekar]

Stanley , I think Ted means two servlet / jsp engines. You install both Tomcat & Resin on your system & see the performance.
He is saying runner as there was servletrunner in previous version of java. Am I correct Ted ? Ted , hope I am correctly interpreting you.
It depends upong what kinds of Test you use to set the benchmarks & come to conclusion.
I think there are papers on web mentioning the various servlet engines & their performances .
I hope this helps.
Shailesh.

[karl koch]

hi,
some say that tomcat is not capable of handling 1000s of requests as needen in real life apps. i dont think so. it is still not the fastest but it's getting better day by day and has lots of capable engineer in it's back to work for free and open source...........

k

[shailesh sonavadekar]

Karl , we can not compare servlet & ejb. They both have different applications & capabilites.
tomcat is not application server like bea Weblogic , websphere. There will be definitely cap on the no. of threads servlets can have.
Shailesh.

[Thomas Paul]

Since Tomcat is a servlet/JSP server, I am moving this to the Apache/Tomcat forum.
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Tom
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java� 2 Platform
Moderator of the forums:
J2EE and EJB
Other Java APIs

[Thomas Paul]

My opinion is that Tomcat runs fine. Just don't use it as a web server. Combined with Apache, it is more than fast enough for most web sites.

[Mike Curwen]

That "tomcat is slow" comment might have been true for the 3.x releases, but the 4.x release has been re-architected and re-written with speed as one of the major design goals.

It's also always been pretty friendly about it's error handling, so I'm not sure where that comes from. If you don't like the errorpage it gives you, you can always make your own.

[Ravi Veera]

I have a suggestion. Can we come up with some basic jsp files/Servlets to benchmark the various servers?. We don't need a full scale benchmark, just a small set of basic tests. We can start with simple tests and build on it as we go on.
I have Tomcat 4.01 running under Windows 2000 with 256 MB RAM. I wouldnt mind running these tests. We could also agree on what tool to use like webbench or the microsoft tool or whatever.
I am sure the results will be useful to all of us.
Regards
Ravi

[DC Dalton]

I have been webmastering two sites for the past 6 months, one with Resin 2.0.1 and another with Tomcat 3.2.3 and I have to say that Resin just plain leaves Tomcat in the dust! Faster, friendlier, easier to config and so on and so on.....I dont know what improvements Tomcat 4.0 has but they have a LONG way to go to catch up with Resin!

[Ashik Uzzaman]

Its true that Tomcat is not as fast as Apache or IIS or other web server for static html pages, but its very good for generating dynamic contents thru Servlet/JSP which is our area of interest. And resin is better in some sense that resin has support for server-side scripting with JSP using JavaScript also that tomcat does not have and resin automatically identifies & reloads the newer version of servlets. But tomcat is the most used servlet/jsp container and thus have a strong support in the community for any instant problem. The instant example may be a seperate forum in JavaRanch for Tomcat....

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Muhammad Ashikuzzaman (Fahim)
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java� 2 Platform
--When you learn something, learn it by heart!

[Mike Curwen]

Tomcat also supports dynamic reloading of servlets.

Check the docs, it's a setting in server.xml http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.0-doc/config/context.html

Search the page for "reloadable"