Reduced java/tomcat performance 6-beta3 -> 6-stable ?

[Eirik Øverby]

[Cross-posting after lack of response on -stable]

Hi all,

are there any obvious changes between 6.0-BETA3 and 6.0-RELEASE / 6.0- 
STABLE that I should be aware of, that could cause a quite noticeable  
decline in performance (and a change in performance patterns) for  
java/tomcat?

On a BETA-3 system I'm seeing, with the particular application we're  
running, about 28 transactions/second over a 10 minute interval. With  
-RELEASE and -STABLE I'm lucky to reach 24, and it'll usually wobble  
around 20.
Another oddity is that where the BETA-3 system starts out with good  
performance from the beginning when running load tests, the -RELEASE  
and -STABLE systems need a good 20 seconds to reach their "max",  
starting out very low (3-10 transactions/second for the first 10  
seconds or so).

This is on HP DL385 servers with dual 2.4ghz Opteron CPUs, running  
FreeBSD-amd64 from 15kRPM drives in cached RAID.

Hardware and software configuration (apart from the base system),  
network configuration and latencies, database access, etc. is 100%  
equal on all systems.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
/Eirik