Number of Instances | Java Servlets tutorial pdf

Number of Instances

The servlet declaration which is part of the deployment descriptor of theWeb application containing the servlet, as described in Chapter SRV.13, “Deployment Descriptor”, controls how the servlet container provides instances of the servlet. 

For a servlet not hosted in a distributed environment (the default), the servlet container must use only one instance per servlet declaration. However, for a servlet implementing the SingleThreadModel interface, the servlet container may instantiate multiple instances to handle a heavy request load and serialize requests to a particular instance.
In the case where a servlet was deployed as part of an application marked in the deployment descriptor as distributable, a container may have only one instance per servlet declaration per Java Virtual Machine (JVMTM). However, if the servlet in a distributable application implements the SingleThreadModel interface, the container may instantiate multiple instances of that servlet in each JVM of the container.

Note About The Single Thread Model

The use of the SingleThreadModel interface guarantees that only one thread at a time will execute in a given servlet instance’s service method. It is important to note that this guarantee only applies to each servlet instance, since the container may choose to pool such objects. Objects that are accessible to more than one servlet instance at a time, such as instances of HttpSession, may be available at any particular time to multiple servlets, including those that implement SingleThreadModel.
It is recommended that a developer take other means to resolve those issues instead of implementing this interface, such as avoiding the usage of an instance variable or synchronizing the block of the code accessing those resources. The SingleThreadModel Interface is deprecated in this version of the specification.