Load testing Tomcat with JMeter, Part I

A collegue of mine (likely annoyed by my bragging about my w1100z) challenged me to compare performance of my Opteron workstation to dual-Xeon *ell servers our company uses in production. Problem is, in many scenarios I simply fail to generate significant load to saturate CPU. Like this one: I try to see how many concurrent sockets can Tomcat tolerate under 64-bit JVM on Solaris 10. And what I see is, JMeter would simply die with no explanation if I set number of parallel threads to number greater than 500. At the same time, Tomcat continues running happily, using ~20% CPU at most. Guess I will have to dump this particular test.