Web Services on Startup or Publishing issue

Hi all,

So coming from the Android world and consuming web services, I now have to build them myself.

I'm using Apache Axis to do a bottom up approach from Java Class to Java Bean to WSDL (whatever.... honestly).

I deploy the Web Service onto Tomcat and it runs fine. But now I have to do scalability testing and I'm using Jmeter to accomplish this.

When I first start tomcat OR republish the webservice the following issues happen: (I restart tomcat before every test)

Invoking a method on my Web Service with 50 and 100 concurrent users gets a response back.

But when I test it with 500 and 1000 concurrent users, the first 20 (for 500 users) and first 200-300 (for 1000 users) requests get declined. But here's the thing, I invoke the same method again w/o restarting or republishing my webservice, and I get a response for every request. There is some kind of "warm-up" that tomcat is doing for my webservice the first time its launched.

I've already changed some stuff in server.xml on tomcat:

But the issue still remains. To be perfectly honest, if there were 500+ users invoking a method the first time I start tomcat, and 20-500 get denied, its fine. They can retry again and it works. But I'm curious if this is a normal issue or is there something I can define in these .xml and .wsdd files that can prevent this?

Googling has produced deployOnStart="true" in the server.xml on tomcat and other stuff... but its not working. Anyone have a helpful hint?

Thanks,

Michael