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