IMO 5-10.000 per day isn't that dramatic at all (unless 50% is in a timespan
of 15 minutes or so ;-)
10.000 per day, that's 1 request every 8 seconds on average. I guess you can
handle that with tomcat on a 486SX. Don't worry too much.
Tomcat can easily handle a few requests per second. Of course everything
depends on what those requests do. (e.g. you're ruight about the connection
pooling)
If you need 500K - 1M requests per day, I think it's time to look at
something faster than tomcat.
You might try out Resin or Orion as alternatives.

Geert Van Damme