Just because Tomcat is a lightweight container with a small footprint doesn't mean it isn't ready to deliver big performance under real-world loads. Tomcat's built-in support for clustering, load balancing, and session persistence means that you can add more power to your network as you need it, allowing your site to scale with your user base. In this article, we'll go over the basic concepts behind clustered architecture, such as load balancing and session persistance, look at some different ways to approach these problems, and then show you how easy it is to set up your own Apache Tomcat clusters. How Clustering Works Although clustering is most frequently talked about in relation to scalability, most modern clustering solutions actually attack a number of related issues in addition to simply providing more CPUs to serve requests. A typical clustering solution aims to provide not only scalability, but also high availability and load balancing. Be...