Tomcat consuming high CPU

My logs were full of Tomcat logs. I deleted all of them and the CPU usage has gone dramatically down.

If you're using 75% CPU and dont understand why, I suggest you issue a kill -3 to the tomcat process (ctrl-break if you have a console) to get a thread dump (when the load is high!). In my experience most threads should either be idle or in io-wait. Look for any single branch of code that has repeated occurences in the stack traces and that's your likely culprit (non-io waits!). This is the "poor man's profiler" that is quite often the best and most efficient way to solve these problems.

To understand what's happening, you should try to run it under a profiler. Try the YourKit (http://www.yourkit.com/) or Netbeans (http://profiler.netbeans.org/docs/help/5.5/profile_j2ee_profileproject.html).

The YourKit one have better integration with tomcat.

Lambda Probe is a very handy tool for monitoring Tomcat.

Are you using a quad CPU system? Probably Tomcat is running 100% in 3 of them. I would first test for an infinite loop or something like that in an application.