TCP connections and HTTP sessions

[tovaldez]

Hi,
monitoring our webapp while running load testing, I noticed that the number of 
the effective users browsing the site is more than the number of opened sockets 
in ESTABLISHED state (while under a 240 Virtual Users load, I see only 180 
ESTABLISHED connections, or 2000VU vs 450 opened sockets).

At first I think this is due to some TCP socket reuse optimization by the JVM 
or the OS. Could someone confirm this idea or give me another interpretation of 
this behaviour?

Tomcat 5.5, default HTTP/1.1 connector with sun JDK 1.5 on a Debian 4.0 box, 
jmeter as test tool.
This is the configuration of the onnector: 
    <Connector port="80" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
                   maxThreads="700" minSpareThreads="250"  maxSpareThreads="300"
               enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="1000"
               connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" />


Thanks