Hi Jason,
> It's nice, isn't it? I was going to write something like it, but since it was
> already there, I just used it. Like I said, it's got a few bugs, but it mostly
> gives useful information, and works pretty well.
Open source :-)
> I may know why this is. Before running my benchmarks, I played with
> ab quite a bit on both Apache and on Tomcat4. I wanted to tune the config
> files to give me the best performance that I could get on my machine.
> I ran lots of tests, changed config values (mainly threading or processing
> limits and defaults), and re-ran tests to see how the changes in the config
> files affected the performance outcomes. I eventually found what I believe
> to be about the most optimal settings *for my machine* for both Apache
> and Tomcat4. So, the configs I show in my tests have been tailored to my
> machine -- its CPU speed, RAM size, everything. Another machine that
> has different specs may not perform well with my machine's configs.. It
> may actually perform worse.
That's one of the best descriptions of what performance tunning means :-)
Yes, it's a lot of work - change every parameter and find how it affects
your system, test again and again until you find the best combination.
Most of the time it's not worth the effort, but for a big site or for a
piece of software that is going to be used by many people I think it is
worth it.
> Do you realize how many servers could be substantially more efficient if
> everyone did that? Just an idea, but I think I want to do it..
The only ways we can get faster servers is to document and discuss those
issues. ( wouldn't be nice not to have to wait 5 seconds for a page to
display ? )
And we should also continue to tune up and improve the performances of
tomcat ( regardless of version number :-).
I don't think static file peformance is the main target ( our goal is to
write a fast servlet engine), and we should compare with Apache2.0 or NES (
wich in many tests was faster than A2.0 ).
What would be very interesting is comparing C modules with servlets ( we
can't be that fast, but if we are withing 50% it's perfect ).
> These numbers look pretty good.. did you also set the VM options
> like "-Xms96m -Xmx96m"? On my machine, that made the maximum
> times come down dramatically -- from the thousands of milliseconds
> to the hundreds of milliseconds. Of course, with a different Tomcat. :)
> It might do the same for yours though, again depending on your machine's
> specs.
Ops, I forgot about that.... You're right.
> > ( BTW, last Apache2.0 I tried was almost 2x faster than 1.3 )
>
> Yeah, that's about what I expect too. It can run in a multithreaded way
> just like Java servers do. So, no more heavyweight processes to lug
> around (not entirely sure this is a big deal on Linux, but on Solaris it
> is, and on other OSs I think it is).
If you have time, you can also take a look at AOLServer ( another
open-source, high-performance server - and it does work with tomcat as
well).
Costin
