[LINK] $1B (US) wasted on bloated Java servers.

[Alastair Rankine]

Rick Welykochy wrote:

>Mr Morris was, I believe, highlighting a different fact. It takes about
>10 X the resources to run a Java-enabled web server (memory + CPU grunt)
>as compared to other lightweight solutions such as Apache + mod_perl,
>or (shiver) PHP.
>
>Java is simply and almost uniquely a total resource pig. As well, development
>time and effort in Java certainly longer than RAD tools such as perl, python
>or PHP. And the ultimate insult: contrary to its raison d'etre, Java does
>not run unchanged on all platforms.
>
Not explicitly in the web application field, but I have a reference to a 
very interesting study done at a German university to compare relative 
efficiency between a number of programming languages; Java, Perl and 
Python included. A string filtering application was used as the basis 
for comparison, and a number of different metrics were taken.

I won't attempt to summarise here - have a look for yourself: 
http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/#jccpprtTR

How does this relate to web applications? Well, the string filtering 
application is a sufficiently generic one to allow at least an 
indication of the relative performance of languages in web development. 
However:

- I would imagine that the 'typical' web application is far more 
IO-bound than the string processing task. Or at least it should be! 
Hence it is likely that the database structure is more important to 
optimise than the language used to access the database.

- Sun's web development frameworks are far more advanced than those for 
perl and python. Yes I am including Zope (albiet version 1.x) in this 
generalisation. The EJB framework seems more scalable (at least in terms 
of ability to add use cases) than any other web framework I have seen. 
Admittedly it has been a while since I've done any web stuff.