title: Tomcat - scaling on a single server
body: <p>I have an embedded Tomcat application running on an Amazon EC2 instance. The site was getting an increased amount of traffic, so I upgraded to a much larger instance. However, with the same amount of traffic and with a much larger server, the slow down was still there. I increased the maxThreads and the xmx/xms, but that didn't help much. </p>
  
  <p>The server resources used are small on both the web server and the database server (RDS) (less than 10% memory and less than 20% CPU). </p>
  
  <p>Is there anything that can be done to speed up Tomcat? Or should I bite the bullet and use multiple Tomcat instances and a load balancer?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>: Just to clarify, nothing has changed in the application, just the traffic increased (almost doubled). My assumption was that (more than) doubling the resources (web server and db) should be adequate. I guess it's not that simple.  </p>