The first time I load balanced several Tomcat nodes behind an Apache using mod_jk was in the early 2000s. Mayb 2002, I'm not sure. Anyway, here is a spot where I will gather my various references on the topic.
White screen of death and how to coordinate the maxConnctions and timeout settings between workers.properties and Tomcat server.xml
Pretty much anything you do will be useful
I've been a grad student for 6 years now. If I could go back in time and talk to myself as a new (or aspiring!) graduate student, here is something I'd tell me.
You probably won't really know what your research contribution is going to be until after you've done it. Don't worry about picking the perfect research problem ahead of time. It's going to change, it might not be what you set out to do in the first place, and that's OK and normal.
It is true that as graduate students, we are expected to make a research contribution that will advance human knowledge in some way. But, don't let this worry you! There is so much out there for us humans to explore that pretty much anything you do will be a useful contribution. So, follow your heart!!
What's the big deal, then? Why is grad school so much work if anything you work on is going to be useful? The place where you will really put in your hard labour of love is in creating that "in between" place of your project and the rest of human knowledge. You keep on building this thing that is made up of a combination of your own work and all the research others have done in your area. Sometimes, you are building it actively (i.e. while you are reading others' work). Other times, this base is just in the back of your mind while you are focusing on your own study. So long as you are showing up, this base of understanding will be forming. Over and over as you read about other's work, you might keep bumping into research papers that seems like they have already solved your problem. But don't worry, these are your friends! Look closer -- your own work is going to be slightly different in some way. These papers will actually strengthen what you have done because they give you a solid step on your base to reach even higher! Then, you create a guide (your thesis) that will show others what your contribution is. As you explain it, the reader will create their own links between your work and their own understanding of human knowledge in this area.
You can't really predict what your contribution will be - it kind of ends up where it just so happens to end up. It's the same with collective human knowledge - we don't know where it will go, and it just kind of ends up where it ends up. Nobody else will have done whatever it is your work turns into. That's why pretty much anything you do will be useful!
You probably won't really know what your research contribution is going to be until after you've done it. Don't worry about picking the perfect research problem ahead of time. It's going to change, it might not be what you set out to do in the first place, and that's OK and normal.
It is true that as graduate students, we are expected to make a research contribution that will advance human knowledge in some way. But, don't let this worry you! There is so much out there for us humans to explore that pretty much anything you do will be a useful contribution. So, follow your heart!!
What's the big deal, then? Why is grad school so much work if anything you work on is going to be useful? The place where you will really put in your hard labour of love is in creating that "in between" place of your project and the rest of human knowledge. You keep on building this thing that is made up of a combination of your own work and all the research others have done in your area. Sometimes, you are building it actively (i.e. while you are reading others' work). Other times, this base is just in the back of your mind while you are focusing on your own study. So long as you are showing up, this base of understanding will be forming. Over and over as you read about other's work, you might keep bumping into research papers that seems like they have already solved your problem. But don't worry, these are your friends! Look closer -- your own work is going to be slightly different in some way. These papers will actually strengthen what you have done because they give you a solid step on your base to reach even higher! Then, you create a guide (your thesis) that will show others what your contribution is. As you explain it, the reader will create their own links between your work and their own understanding of human knowledge in this area.
You can't really predict what your contribution will be - it kind of ends up where it just so happens to end up. It's the same with collective human knowledge - we don't know where it will go, and it just kind of ends up where it ends up. Nobody else will have done whatever it is your work turns into. That's why pretty much anything you do will be useful!
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