JBoss vs Orion on Tru64

[orlat84]

Hi there,

I have to make a research for application servers running on Tru64 OS. The first choices would be the cheapest ones: JBoss and Orion ;).
So I have started searching the web for infos regarding the 2 application servers. Unfortunatelly I do not have right now a running Tru64 machine in order to make some tests by myself. So I tried to gather infos from the 2 communities.

At first sight the JBoss community seems more active and also I have seen posts from people running JBoss on Tru64. On the Orion side the comunity is more silent and also I haven't seen any evidence from anyone running Orion on the specified OS. But from what I have read I have a feeling that a good JVM for Tru64 will be enough for Orion to work properly.
Another thing that I have seen is that there are many complains about the performance of JBoss, while everybody seems to agree that Orion performs quite well(it is true that those complains refered to older versions of JBoss).
My first feeling is that I like more JBoss but the problem with the performance scares me(Our system will have minimum 700 simultaneous users).

So if anyone has any success stories about JBoss and Tru64 please fill free to share them with me. Is the current version of JBoss fast enough to handle the load required by our application?

Thanks,

Florin

[french_c]

I was running Orion around 2001 on Tru64 without any problems. Both JBoss and Orion do have their pros and cons, but better don't judge on developer activity but on features you need.

Jens

[orlat84]

ok I agree with you.

but I was wondering how JBoss will perform on high loads. For example how JBoss will scale for 15 simultaneous users, or for 40 or for 700?

As far as I have read the performance tests showed a significant better performance for Orion.

Can you please be more specific with the pros and cons of JBoss and Orion?

Thanks,

Florin

"french_c" wrote:
I was running Orion around 2001 on Tru64 without any problems. Both JBoss and Orion do have their pros and cons, but better don't judge on developer activity but on features you need.

Jens

[marc.fleury]

Guys,

take a look at the top left corner of THIS VERY WEB PAGE

it says (at the time of my writing)

- Who's Online

Currently, 420 guests and 27 members are online.

members are guys that are doing read-write on forums (like me).

So you see that a properly configured JBoss scales. BTW I should mention that the average utilization on this box is 3%. That's right 3%.

We run large sites (including playboy.com and EAGames, theSimsOnline) in the more serious category we run MCI and Siemens employee portal as well as coke music and dowjonesindexes.com. Trust me these are million hits sites ;)

JBoss scales just fine, if you can't it where you want it, let us know you can read our doc for optimization (clever use of cache speeds up a lot of things).

[orlat84]

can you please give me more details about the configuration of the box which runs the site? (processor/RAM) r u using a cluster? how many instances r there?

our application will be insert/update intensive, will have also a lot of views and reports to generate. I am wondering how JBoss scales in such situations.

i think from the 975 online users that appear online when I am writing this message most of them are browsing the site not posting. So I agree with you in this case a clever use of cache will improve the performance significantly.

I know the best way to find it out is to test it by myself, but I think that the experience of the others involved in the industry worth be considered.
I hope that the advices are from a developer POV not a marketing campaign. From the marketing POV I think JBoss has some years ahead of Orion.(finally it is an american project ;))

Thanks for the quick feedback,

Florin

[juha]

It's not a cluster, its a single instance running this site.

[french_c]

"marc fleury" wrote:
Guys,
take a look at the top left corner of THIS VERY WEB PAGE

Yeah Marc, I have created too many dynamic counters which follow a predefined 24h cycle to show how busy a certain page is. And even if you really have 900 web users online it boils down to 35 to 50 requests per second (average user, no frames). Since most of the users will be probably in the forum we talk about less than that anyway. Having said that, JBoss will handle this kind of load easily, as every other app server does.

However this is definitly the wrong forum to talk about orion vs. jboss without any bias. I like JBoss, and I like Orion. Both for different reasons. While we deployed our application on Tru64 the orion jsp/servlet container was way faster than jetty/tomcat ... and this should be still the case. A non clustered orion offered a little bit better performance for EJBs (again at that timeframe). But both have problems with their clustered EJBs in comparsion to other app servers.

Our Hardware layout:
We started with 2 DS20E (2x667MhZ, I believe 512MB only) and ended up with 4. We never needed more than one, but hey, that was a dotcom and we had the money;)

As of today I would probably choose JBoss over Orion, since after the orion/oracle deal Magnus basically stopped working on it. I believe orion is way behind the current J2EE spec implementation.