What's the purpose of AsyncContext.start(…) in Servlet 3.0?

Question

Servlet API says about \"AsyncContext.start\":

void start(java.lang.Runnable run)

Causes the container to dispatch a thread, possibly from

Answer 1

Tomcat ThreadPoolExecutor based on java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor and configured in Apache Tomcat 8 Configuration Reference. It handles all Tomcat request, so, if you have long running task its better to handle them in own small-size Fixed/Cached thread pool and submit task like described here.