In addition to the standard optimization in the production configuration, there are a couple of simple techniques you can use to improve the performance and stability of your server.

The production configuration increases the JVM heap memory size to 1.7 GB. You should probably change it to fit your own server. For instance, if have a 64 bit server with several GBs of RAM, you can probably increase this value as long as you also use a 64 bit JVM. If your server has less than 2 GB RAM, you should decrease that value accordingly. In the production/run.conf file, the -Xmx and -Xms parameters specify the maximum and minimum heap sizes respectively. It is recommended that you set the -Xmx and -Xms to the same value to avoid dynamic re-sizing of the heap, which is a source of instability in many JVMs. You could also consider turing on parallel GC options if you are using the Sun JVM on a multi-core machine. The following is an example setup you might use a reference. Please see the Sun JVM documentation for more details on this startup parameters.

JAVA_OPTS="-Xms1740m -Xmx1740m -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=512
  -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled 
  -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled"

In the embedded Tomcat module, you can turn off the development mode so that the server does not constantly monitor the changes in JSP files. To do that, edit the deploy/jboss-web.deployer/conf/web.xml file and add the development attribute to the JspServlet.

  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>jsp</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet</servlet-class>
    ... ...
    <init-param>
      <param-name>development</param-name>
      <param-value>false</param-value>
    </init-param>
    ... ...

In Tomcat, you could adjust the size of the thread pool. If you have multi-core CPUs or more than one CPUs on your server, it might be beneficial to increase the thread pool beyond the default 250. On the other hand, if you have a slow server, decreasing the thread pool will decrease the overhead on the server. The thread pool size can be adjusted via the deploy/jboss-web.deployer/server.xml file.

  ... ...
  <Connector port="8080" address="${jboss.bind.address}"
         maxThreads="250" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
         emptySessionPath="true" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
         enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
         connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" />
  ... ...

In addition, JBoss AS needs to use a relational database to store runtime data. In a production environment, you should use a production quality database to replace the embedded HSQL database. Please see Appendix C, Use Alternative Databases with JBoss AS for more information on how to setup alternative databases for the JBoss AS.