[lug] Development & reporting tool choices

[George Sexton]

I have a web calendar application that we wrote in Java as a servlet 
application. We sell the app as software, and we also run it as an ASP.

On our hosted servers, we are running 250 virtual hosts/instances of our 
servlet application per server. According to Tomcat, it's using about 
1GB of memory. I have 2GB allocated on the 32 bit machine. The 64 bit 
machines have 3GB allocated.

I'm doing about 2.2 million hits per week spread across the 3 servers.

Startup on the dual-core, 64 bit machines is about 140 seconds. On the 
single core, 32-bit machine startup is about 200 seconds.

SAR reports the utilization on the single core machine to be about 
15-25%. When the single core machine starts hitting it's limit, I'll be 
adjusting our creation system to favor the dual core machines...

Probably one thing that's increasing CPU utilization is that my app uses 
GZIP compression on all pages, so I'm paying CPU overhead to compress 
each page. OTOH, we have customers in Ireland, Austria, New Zealand, 
Australia, Hong Kong, Great Britain, and many other places and no one 
complains about performance. A 40K calendar view page compresses to 
about 6K.

The Weather channel uses Tomcat/Servlets for their operations. The idea 
that Java can't do well for performance intensive web applications is 
just silly.

Bear Giles wrote:
> Welcome to the 21st century.  Java 1.0 was interpreted and slow, current 
> runtime engines use 'hotspot' optimization and routinely compile the 
> bytecode to native code.  In tests it's often -faster- than 
> conventionally compiled code.  Appserver startup can take a long time, 
> but that should be an extraordinarily rare event.
> 
> That brings up a big point against C: memory leakage. It's possible to 
> avoid memory leakage, but it takes good practices and some nonstandard 
> libraries.  E.g., every server I know uses 'pools' instead of the usual 
> malloc() calls.  All of your libraries will also need to be tested for 
> memory leakage.
> 
> Finally you don't want to casually dismiss the question of where you'll 
> find people to write the app, how much they'll have to write themselves 
> vs. using a well-tested library, etc.  I used C for over 20 years but I 
> have no doubt that Java is a better choice for web development because 
> of these factors.
> 
> Bear
> 
> Kevin Kempter wrote:
>>
>> The issues with the web & scripting languages out there is that the 
>> code is interpreted, so anyone who uses the scripts has the full set 
>> of source code, with the exception of Java however Java brings its 
>> owns set of drawbacks to the table which I feel are significant enough 
>> to warrant not going there. I think C is a good choice since it highly 
>> efficient and its compiled, I am however open to alternate (compiled) 
>> suggestions
>>
>>   
> 
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-- 
George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
Voice: +1 303 438 9585
URL:   http://www.mhsoftware.com/