Suggestion from mailing list
> 2. I'm going to be running GATE/ANNIE in Tomcat and feeding strings 
> via POST/GET.  What is the most memory/speed efficient way to load it 
> once and run it 100,000 times? Perhaps just create a servlet that 
> loads itself 'on start' in Tomcat, runs Gate.init once, and waits for a request?

Something like this - in init() you call Gate.init() and create your application Controller.  In doGet/doPost you read the text from the request, create a GATE Document, pass it to the controller, do something with the results and release the document (with Factory.deleteResource).

You just have to watch out for multi-threading issues - you can't use the same Controller or PRs in different threads at the same time, so if you have a single application you will only be able to serve one request at a time. 
When I do this kind of thing I create a number of identical copies of the controller in my init() and put them into a pool, so each request gets one copy of the application from the pool and returns it when the request is finished.  
You need one copy of the application for every request you want to process concurrently, i.e. with a pool of 3 apps you can serve three clients at once.






public class RunAnnie extends HttpServlet {


    /** The Corpus Pipeline application to contain ANNIE */
    private SerialAnalyserController annieController;
	
	public void init() throws ServletException {
		
		try {
			Gate.init();
		} catch (GateException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		
		try {
/* COMMENT: This needs to be initialized once per thread/copy for the thread pool */
			this.initAnnie();
		} catch (GateException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
 	}