I created some sort of RESTful API backend for a mobile app. It's written completely in Java using Jersey as Framework. At the moment no database is used, it's all in the memory, but this is no problem so far (it's only for prototyping purposes). I ordered the smallest package from digital ocean and installed tomcat7. All in all tomcat works, but I have three major problems:

1) It takes a long time until tomcat deploys the app: I deploy it per tomcat manager and it takes about 2 minutes unit the site works (excl. war upload time).

2) The war files are quite big (16MB): I don't know why they are so big. There are no database dependencies and most logic is written in plain java. Okay, we are using jersey, but 16MB are a lot for the logic of a small webservice.

3) I have to restart tomcat all 3 days or so. It looks like a memory leak or something similar. If the app runs for a few days the response time is quite high and the server seems to be frozen. It works again, if I restart tomcat per ssh.

You can find my mvn pom file right here. Do you have some tips? Are there good tomcat alternatives?