[Building Sakai] Portfolio performance problem

[Joshua Swink]

We have a problem with portfolios such that whenever several people
try to add content to them, the tomcat instance goes down. It uses up
all of its database connections, then it can't get any more, then it
fails to recover and remains wedged.

I did a test with 6 simultaneous users creating this portfolio, and
then trying to add/edit content. There were over 15,000 calls to
DbContentService.getResourcesOfType. The portfolio contains only a
form to be filled out. This seems excessive.

On our production system, when 6 users perform this action
simultaneously, it takes 5-10 minutes. When 12 users try it, it may
never complete. On our unloaded test system, 6 users can do it in 30
seconds. So obviously there is a loaded-database component to this
issue.

Is this amount of database access normal for portfolios with forms?
Anyone have insight into reducing the load it puts on the database?

Thanks for any help.

--
Joshua Swink