title: How many requests per second can Tomcat handle on an average server?
body: <p>I'm trying to figure out how many requests an average server could handle. I'm not looking for an exact answer, just an approximate figure.</p>
  
  <p>The server will tunnel/balance the incoming requests to N internal servers that will do the actual processing. The GET requests will have a max 2K total HTTP size (including headers) and the  balancing algorithm will use a simple and quick algorithm that involves a combination of the incoming request parameters and a small in-memory map to determine the destination server.</p>
  
  <p>The only purpose of this server is to be able to receive as many requests as possible and to decide which server from the distributed environment will be processing the request.</p>
  
  <p>What can I expect from Tomcat in terms of how many requests can be processed per second?
  1000/s, 5000/s, 10000/s, 50000/s etc.</p>
  
  <p>What are the software/hardware components of the system that have the greatest influence on this metric?  (e.g. maxThreads="500", using AJP, cpu, network controller, ...)</p>
  
  <p>Sebi</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: average server = Dell PowerEdge R310 or anything similar (Xeon X3480, 3.06 GHz, Intel Gigabit ET Dual Port NIC)</p>