Tomcat vs. Resin (original) (raw)

I'm faced with a decision to make at work. We've been using Resin 2.1 for several years as our servlet container, mostly because three years ago when we were first 'breaking into' Servlets/JSPs, that seemed the most performant platform, and a "safe" buy to get support (at $3000, it seemed well worth it just in case we ever ran into an issue).

Now, we're a major revision behind, since Resin 3.0 has been out for quite a while. I've played around with upgrading to this version, but there's enough things done differently that it hasn't worked for me yet.

I've also seen a couple bugs in session management with Resin that make me unsure if I want to stick with Resin as a platform anyway (I see session ids being reused almost immediately, and I've found what I believe are race conditions where sometimes users seem to be getting sessions with data already in them - I can't prove it yet, but my application logs really do seem to be pointing towards that). So, I'm pondering moving to Tomcat/Catalina.

So, since 2001, has Tomcat matured enough to be a serious platform? Is it just as performant as a commercial engine? I'm not obsessed with performance, hardware is cheap, but I don't want to see a huge hit.

So, I'm rambling on... but has anyone out there used Tomcat enough to have a good opinion on whether this is a path I can recommend to upper management? I need to defend this use of my time somehow if I do decide to go that route.