Hi Rick,

> My web app returns 10 records of about 100 characters each in less
> than 4 seconds on the first search, and in less than 1 second on
> subsequent searches (connection is pooled, so it doesn't have to set
> it up again).

Seconds?!

I do not know what does JSTL does, but on my dual CPU Netfinity with
750 MHz Pentium III I'm transferring megabytes, usually it is ~4-8 ms
per 1k object to load from DB and ~20 ms to parse XML, construct
object and save it to the DB.

Can you please run AS3AP benchmark on your machine and report numbers
here?

Thanks!
Roman