Interesting performance degradation after upgrading to (relatively) recent versions of the Tomcat application stack - since 7.0.x, fix has been backported to 6.x and 5.5x as well. Sharing / documenting it here in case it helps others.
This stems from a change introduced to Tomcat as part of bug 48903/44041/48694 to fix a deadlock some users were experiencing.
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=927565
For us, this issue was shown due to our use of the Saxon XSLT transformer library showing higher contended time.
The particular problem is that Saxon 9.1.x library, for each transform:
- To get an emitter, calls the Configuration.makeEmitter()
- This calls DynamicLoader.getInstance()
- Inside the container, this defers to WebappClassLoader
- loadClass on WebappClassLoader is now declared synchronized.
Other platforms eg Struts2 have worked around this by caching classes loaded through the class loader - see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WW-3902 .
Haven't worked out the fix yet - ideal solution will be to remove the need for XSLT in the processing path, unlikely but one can hope. (XSLT is required here to support a particular legacy expectation of the formatting of the returned XML).
