SaaS Scalability - Is Tomcat Scalable enough?

We are building a SaaS application that will be multi-tenant and is envisaged to have heavy user traffic. The solution will be hosted on Liferay Portal. Liferay out of the box has great support for Tomcat and works well with it. They do have support for other app servers as well. But we are currently leaning towards Tomcat.

The Portal will be mainly a front-end services by webservices living on different App Servers (Glassfish in most cases). We do not need any more J2EE functionality for the portal than that offered by a vanilla tomcat.

Is Tomcat scalable enough to support a multi tenant heavy traffic Saas Application? I wanted to 开发者_运维技巧know what could be the problems we could encounter with Tomcat.

Cheers! Nirav

This is a pretty opinionated question and rather system admin related. That being said, I'd recommend to read Liferay's performance whitepaper which might give you a hint on the actual kind of numbers (and usecases) that you'd like to cover.

I think that tomcat itself - from a performance point of view - scales quite well with Liferay. The cluster administration is what might require some more work than on the "big iron" application servers. So, in general it depends on what you want to scale for. Also, are your users "user accounts" or "concurrent users"?