LINK

Web tier clustering is an important part of J2EE scalability and high availability. Traditionally, load balancing is done via front end load balancer (either software- or hardware-based) while the session replication (for fail-over) is done by the web container. Here we have done a benchmark study of http session replication using JBoss Application Server (AS). We also compare JBoss performance against the Tomcat standalone. Please note that JBoss web container also uses embedded Tomcat in non-clustered mode. They differ only in the clustering solution module. For details of both implementation, please refer to both the JBoss and Tomcat documentation. The HttpSession replication performance comparisons are based on JBoss AS 4.0.3SP1 (with JBossCache 1.2.4 and JGroups 2.2.9). Previously, we have published results based on JBoss AS 4.0.2 (August 2005). But the current version has been found to provide dramatic performance improvement.