Alternatives to Tomcat

[Peter Davies]

Hi all,

I'm starting to get heartily sick of Tomcat 5.0, which just doesn't seem
to be cutting it in our production environment.

Apart from Sun's Web Application Server, what stable alternatives are
there that can support upwards of 10 000 requests per day? Our environment
is Solaris and Linux-based, and our portals are simple two-tier webapps.

Thanks.

 

[Andrew Thompson]

I'm starting to get heartily sick of Tomcat 5.0, which just doesn't seem
to be cutting it in our production environment.

Apart from Sun's Web Application Server, what stable alternatives are
there that can support upwards of 10 000 requests per day? Our environment
is Solaris and Linux-based, and our portals are simple two-tier webapps.

You forgot to mention a price range.

 

[Peter Davies]

You forgot to mention a price range.

Point. Our shop is open-source based, but it can stretch quite a distance
if the motivation for commercial software is there. I'm more interested in
usability, performance and support - someone else can haggle over the
price.

 

[Roedy Green]

Apart from Sun's Web Application Server, what stable alternatives are
there that can support upwards of 10 000 requests per day? Our environment
is Solaris and Linux-based, and our portals are simple two-tier webapps.

for a list of possibilities, see
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/servletwomb.html

 

[Andrew Thompson]

Peter Davies wrote:

(high volume server)

..I'm more interested in
usability, performance and support - someone else can haggle over the
price.

'All prices considered at this stage'. Cool.

I notice Roedy has given you some possibilities 'in that range'. ;-)

 

[Luke Webber]

Hi all,

I'm starting to get heartily sick of Tomcat 5.0, which just doesn't seem
to be cutting it in our production environment.

Apart from Sun's Web Application Server, what stable alternatives are
there that can support upwards of 10 000 requests per day? Our environment
is Solaris and Linux-based, and our portals are simple two-tier webapps.

Can you give us more information on why Tomcat isn't cutting it? I ask
from interest, because I have sites running Tomcat, wome of which must
be getting similar traffic, and I haven't seen any problems. Admittedly,
I don't think any of them is running version 5 of Tomcat, but the
busiest one is running version 4 on a single Sun box.

Cheers,
Luke

 

[Roedy Green]

Can you give us more information on why Tomcat isn't cutting it? I ask
from interest, because I have sites running Tomcat, wome of which must
be getting similar traffic, and I haven't seen any problems. Admittedly,
I don't think any of them is running version 5 of Tomcat, but the
busiest one is running version 4 on a single Sun box.

What he might be hinting at is that you need some information on
tuning tomcat.

 

[Ross Bamford]

Hi all,

I'm starting to get heartily sick of Tomcat 5.0, which just doesn't seem
to be cutting it in our production environment.

Apart from Sun's Web Application Server, what stable alternatives are
there that can support upwards of 10 000 requests per day? Our
environment
is Solaris and Linux-based, and our portals are simple two-tier webapps.

Thanks.

IMHO Jetty would be more than adequate for your needs.

http://jetty.mortbay.org/

 

[gerrards8]

Hi all,

I'm starting to get heartily sick of Tomcat 5.0, which just doesn't seem
to be cutting it in our production environment.

Apart from Sun's Web Application Server, what stable alternatives are
there that can support upwards of 10 000 requests per day? Our environment
is Solaris and Linux-based, and our portals are simple two-tier webapps.

Thanks.

Caucho's Resin (http://www.caucho.com)

 

[Luke Webber]

What he might be hinting at is that you need some information on
tuning tomcat.

For 10,000 requests per day? Even if we take that as an 8-hour business
day, that's still only one request every three seconds. Tomcat should
have no trouble with that sort of load, Shirley?

I dunno. I suspect it's not Tomcat causing the problems here. It may
well be a simple case of bad design in the webapp or the database.

Luke

 

[.]

Point. Our shop is open-source based, but it can stretch quite a distance
if the motivation for commercial software is there. I'm more interested in
usability, performance and support - someone else can haggle over the
price.

- JBoss 3.2 or 4.0
- Bea WebLogic 8.1 or 9.0
- IBM WebSphere 5.0, 5.1 or 6.0
- Oracle AS 9i or 10g
- ATG Dynamo 6.3, 6.4 or 7.0
- SAP Web App Server 6.2 or 6.4
- Caucho Resin
- JRun 4.0

I think that pretty much covers the field. If you are going to spend money
WebLogic, WebSphere and Oracle are the higher priced app servers. If you
are looking for something better than Tomcat I'd think these are hugely
overpowered for your needs.

I kind of like JBoss. The price is the same as Tomcat. If you pick JBoss
pick a release and stick with it. I found that each revision has a
different set of quirks that you have to overcome but once you get
something working it works quite well; just don't upgrade the server.

 

[Henry Townsend]

- JBoss 3.2 or 4.0
- Bea WebLogic 8.1 or 9.0
- IBM WebSphere 5.0, 5.1 or 6.0
- Oracle AS 9i or 10g
- ATG Dynamo 6.3, 6.4 or 7.0
- SAP Web App Server 6.2 or 6.4
- Caucho Resin
- JRun 4.0

I think that pretty much covers the field.

You forgot (at least) Jetty and Orion.

HT

 

[Bryce]

- JBoss 3.2 or 4.0

Except that JBoss uses Tomcat (by default) for JSP/Servlets.

 

[Roedy Green]

You forgot (at least) Jetty and Orion.

My list has about 40 entries

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/servletwomb.html

 

[oopsatwork]

I've got some bad news for you...Tomcat isn't your problem. You need
to take a look at the performance of your apps. I have run Tomcat 5 on
a very high volume set of applications (several multiples of the load
that you describe) without difficulty. I think you should spend your
time profiling your applications (something that is not given nearly
enough attention by most developers and groups).

Mind you, the strength of the machine you are on could play a role here
too...we like to believe that resources are never ending on modern
boxes, but this simply isn't the case. A little bit of bad code (we
all have it) can cause a lot of problems.

 

[.]

Except that JBoss uses Tomcat (by default) for JSP/Servlets.

True but I have found JBoss to be more robust. I have written apps and
load tested them on JBoss. Once I find the settings for my tool that will
overload the app, I deploy it on Tomcat and run the same tests. Tomcat
tends to die before the app. I have to dial down the load to make Tomcat
not crash.

 

[Roedy Green]

I think you should spend your
time profiling your applications (something that is not given nearly
enough attention by most developers and groups).

There is a belief that you should push all your concerns about
performance to the last minute. That just makes them all the harder
to correct. Performance should be a concern at every stage so that
you don't end up having to redo everything in a totally different way.

The silliness that Knuth warns about is FINE TUNING the optimisation
where it does not need it, or before things have not settled
sufficiently.

He is not recommending postponing performance considerations when
designing data structures or basic algorithms which are hard to change
later.

 

[Chad]

We easily run over 100,000 transactions per day with a WebSphere server
(< 1% CPU usage) but I think that Tomcat should be able to handle that
kind of volume as well. You might want to check for other problems
such as memory leaks, database locks, etc.

 

[Larry Coon]

My list has about 40 entries

You did miss Sybase's:

<http://www.sybase.com/products/developmentintegration/easerver>


Larry Coon
University of California

 

[Roedy Green]

You did miss Sybase's:

<http://www.sybase.com/products/developmentintegration/easerver>

Thanks, now added. I learned my SQL on Sybase. I remember being so
blown away at how fast it was given all the fooling around I knew it
had to do to analyse my queries and all the futzing getting info in
and out of SQL.