Requests Not Reaching Servlet

Question

Hi Guys
I have a servlet that reads a file from the hard disk and sends it to the servlet output stream. Once the servlet is file is placed into the stream it is deleted from the hard disk. I am load testing this using Apache JMeter. The problem I have is that not all the requests seem to be reaching the servlet. For example, I send 100 requests through and only 80 seem to get through. I know that the requests do not come through because of logging and the fact that the files are not deleted.
I thought at first it was an issue with tomcat as it only starts to fail around 5-10 requests a second, but I have a webservice on the same server that can deal with 10+ a second. Could it possibly be related to way the servlet has been implemented?
Does anyone have any other ideas why this could be?

Answer 1

I suggest using synchronize on the entire block of code to see if the problem goes away before tackling any performance issues (thereby dealing with one issue at a time). If it fixes it, you can look at only putting the synchronize block around a critical subsection of code. I'm not familiar enought with synchronization and related issues to advice any further.
Reading a file via a servlet for each user's request doesn't sound very efficient. A web server such as Apache is designed to serve up static content (files) efficiently. You might read up on how it does so rather than use tomcat (apache uses tomcat to server up dynamic pages). Again, I'm not familiar enough with this topic to say much more about it.