I kept the tests running for a whole night, so i guess the
thread startup has little overhead for a long run.
I had restarted my server for both the tests, and i had changed the configuration in server.xml as follows
maxThreads=250, minSpareThreads=75
One more symptom that i see is that the classes loaded keeps increasing during the test, till it goes upto 40000 in about 3 hours even though all the threads are sending the same request. Then it comes down ( i guess garbage collection ). I am setting permMaxSize=128m, minheap=256m maxheap=512m.
I should also say that my web application processing involves a lot of XSLTC processing.