For reasons unknown, this message hasn't been going out to the list. Trying
again.
--
Okay, I've clearly managed to piss off a few people by my concerns about
JBoss performance.
Let me start out by saying that I'd be more than happy to get my application
working speedily under JBoss. Orion's documentation is poor at best, and
JBoss is fully open-source. I have a great deal of respect for some of
JBoss's technology (the verifier and deployer are probably the best I've
seen), and where it's coming from. I chose JBoss for the initial
development because of its reputation and my own interests.
That said, if the performance I'm getting out of JBoss is the best I can
expect, or, at least, the best I can manage to get, then I absolutely cannot
use it. Not because I think it 'sucks rocks', because it doesn't, but
simply because it will not support the user load I need it to in any sort of
cost-effective manner. Some of you would probably be just as happy to see
me go somewhere else, from the tone of your emails, but I'd personally
rather find a way to get the performance out of JBoss, for this or other
projects.
And, ultimately, it seems as if the performance I'm asking for is relatively
reasonable. I expect a certain amount of overhead in EJB performance, and
I'm not asking to duplicate the speed of a bean-only implementation. But
supporting a maximum of 25 concurrent users on a decent (if not maxed-out)
server seems ... suspiciously slow.
It may be that I've missed some settings to speed things up. It may be that
our application's architecture is better suited to Orion than to JBoss.
Whatever it is, I'd like to find out. So I've joined the JBoss list, and
I'm here to ask some questions. I'm not trying to promote Orion, or insult
JBoss. I like bits of both of them, and the reasons for that, I can get
into another day. Ultimately, however, I'd rather support JBoss as an
open-source appserver, if I can.
--
Now, on to the details. Some of you pointed out, and rightly so, that I
hadn't provided much in the way of details of what I've tried, which is
true. I wanted to start off by finding out if the kind of numbers I was
talking about seemed realistic or not, based on the experience of people
who'd spent more time with JBoss than I have, but it's probably fair to say
that you couldn't really say without knowing a lot more about my
application. So let's get into a few details.
Let's start with versions. I did some of my original EJB experimentation on
JBoss-2.4.1. We started developing a project on JBoss-2.4.1a w/ Embedded
Tomcat, which was the latest JBoss/Tomcat grouping at the time. We started
noticing performance concerns then. When Tomcat 4 came out, we moved to
JBoss-2.4.3 w/ Embedded Catalina, so that we could try a few things, and
found it not to be slower, so we stayed with it.
After we reached a point where we needed to see better performance, we did
some optimizing of our app with a profiler, and tried JBoss 2.4.3 w/ Resin,
which we already knew to be fast. That gave us a minor speed boost, but not
very much, leading me to believe that JBoss might be the cause of some of
our performance. By comparison, Orion 1.5.2 seems to be very much faster.
All of this is running on Windows 2000. The versions of Tomcat are 3.2.3
and 4.0, as far as I know. The version of Resin is the latest version as of
a few weeks ago, I'd have to go check. If it's important, I will.
Processor speed depended, but developers are working, largely, on
PIII-700MHzs, and we did most of our load-testing on a Ghz P4.
Tuned updates are on, jaws debug is off, and logging was set as low as we
really could expect it to be.
Our performance numbers were derived in several ways - by using the
Microsoft Web Application Stress tool (since we've used that in the past,
and haven't yet found a better alternative; if you have suggestions, I'm
happy to hear them), watching memory/processor load on the box being tested,
junit test times and subjective experience.
Our initial concerns came out of JUnit test times. Our EJB tests (which are
pretty thorough, I'll admit) are taking several seconds, whereas the time
required to test a hand-rolled bean solution was usually well, well under a
second. HttpUnit tests are taking tens of seconds, instead of seconds.
This began to concern me, but we didn't need performance at an early stage,
and I knew I could replace Tomcat and/or JBoss if necessary.
Once we started to use the Web Application Stress Tool, though, we started
to get really concerned. After some profiling to speed a few things up, we
were unable to get more than about 20 simultaneous users on the application
without slowing things down significantly, getting Time To Last Byte on some
of the more intense pages up past ten seconds, which is far too long. Even
running Resin and JBoss together was getting us only up to 25. The
processor usage on the server while the load test was running was
practically solid at 100% for the bulk of the test and the JVM doesn't seem
to be using up all the memory it has already, so we didn't increase the JVM
memory space.
By comparison, under Orion, I can get 350 users on the same application, and
the processor load is only up around 65%.
This concerns me. The application is going to be used by quite probably 200
users at once, possibly double or triple that, on a regular basis, and
perhaps up to 2000 users under peak loads. That's not a massively-heavy web
application, in my mind. Not being able to get past 25 users under JBoss is
just not going to cut it, so if I have to put up with poor documentation,
closed source, and shelling out for an orion deployment license to get the
speed I need, I will.
But if you all can recommend alternatives to get speed out of JBoss, I'd
love to hear it.
--
There's been a number of suggestions to try JBoss/Jetty. I'll give it a
shot, although I don't know much about Jetty. I'd also like to throw
together a simple performance test that I could use to demonstrate my issue
a lot better than the existing application, but I don't know if I'm going to
have time to do that, particularly since I also want to evaluate the
newly-free HP-AS to get some feeling for it in comparison to both JBoss and
Orion. It may turn out that we go with Orion for this project simply to
save time figuring out our other options. If we can get acceptable
performance out of Orion in the near term, it may be more cost-effective
than spending time diagnosing our JBoss issues.
If there are suggestions on how we can increase our performance, or requests
for more information, I'm open to hear them. Even if I don't have time to
implement them on this project, I'd love to know how I could make use of
JBoss on future projects without encountering this kind of performance
issue.
Thanks in advance,
- Geoffrey
__________________________________________________________
Geoffrey Wiseman: Internet Applications Manager
Medium One
t. 416.977.2101 x. 529
http://www.mediumone.com/
__________________________________________________________
Think it. Build it. Work it.
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