How fast is the virtualization server compared to a “normal” version of Tomcat?
The virtualization server is slower at deploying web applications than a normal version of Tomcat, since each web application is read out of the Alfresco repository via RMI rather than being read directly off disk (as happens with a vanilla installation of Tomcat). Once deployment is complete however, performance should be fairly comparable. You can test this for yourself quite easily by doing a CIFS mount, copying the contents of a webapp to a native file system, and pointing a “pristine” version of Tomcat at it. From there, a cheap and cheerful way to do a comparison on your hardware is to just point a spider at the splash page of each server.
