JSP very slow

Question

hi there, I was just wondering on this.
I set up tomcat and it is running on a 200Mhz machine with only 64mb of ram, running apache 9.0 (which is a little ram hungry!)
it is running painfully slow, just wondering what the key factor is with jsp is it processor speed? ram? what?
BTW not going through apache and these files are the exmaples jsp pages from tomcat. also running tomcat 4.1.2
thanks

Answer 1

The first time you access a JSP page via a web browser, Tomcat has to convert your JSP page into a sort of temporary Servlet, compile it into a class file, then "execute" the class file to generate HTTP output.
Subsequent attempts to access that JSP page simply "executes" the existing class file. Tomcat will refrain from recompiling it unless either a) Tomcat has rebooted since the class file was generated, or b) the Tomcat administrator has sent it an explicit instruction to recompile the class.
So yes, the behavior you've described is to be expected; the initial delay is the conversion/compilation of the class. If subsequent connections are fast enough for your taste, then you're ok. A good way to test it is to make a JSP page that accepts a parameter and prints it back out to the user via the web page. When Tomcat gets the request the second time, it will just pass the parameter to the class object.
If you still must do some tweaking - such as precompiling aka "preloading" classes when the server is booted, check out the Tomcat documentation at the Jakarta site.