connections remaining open and LAS server speed

[Phil Moses <pbmoses@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello,
I am beginning to see some behavior which I cannot quite figure out with
our LAS server here. 
 Basically connections are remaining open to port 8080 (in netstat it
registers as webcache however it is actually the tomcat server.)
The more of these connections that remain open, the slower the server
responds. However, it gets to the point of being unbearably slow at
approximately 20 open connections. On the client side I am not sure if
the connections are not closing properly or if the clients are leaving
the browsers open. The machines itself is a dual Xeon 2.6Ghz with a GB
or memory with it's only purpose being for running the Apache and LAS
servers, I am starting the tomcat server with the directives of 

Using JAVA_OPTS:       -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx512M -Xms512M


Any idea of what could be slowing this down to the point of almost no
data being transmitted. Giving the "top" and "vmstat" commands provide
me with little to no details of what could be happening. 

Also the machine is running RedHat 9.0 

Thanks,
Phil Moses

-- 
Phil Moses
UNIX/Network/Computing Administration and Support
Physical Oceanography Research Division, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
pbmoses@ucsd.edu
858-822-1541