Tomcat 5.5 startup faster in jdk6

I decided to be an early adopter apparently, and downloaded java 6 this am. I wanted to see if tomcat and our site functioned correctly under the new jdk.

So far, so good. Havent run across any errors yet, so we might be able to move to java 6 early next year..further testing is definitely needed. I want to do a load test, similiar to the test we did for webwork vs struts. Due to the holidays, that probably wont happen until January.

However, i did notice one performance increase already. I run tomcat within my IDE (eclipse or netbeans 6)..and i have logging set to debug for my app on my dev machine. Under jdk 5 the past several months..startup time is consistently around 23-25 seconds.

After switching to jdk 6...tomcat startup time has gone from 23 seconds to 9 seconds on average..thats a pretty nice speedup!

Thats only one very minor test..but it sure is nice to cut the startup time by so much. Hope we see a nice performance boost when we load test the app in java 6, too, in a few weeks. Of course, i'll post the results here when we get them.