5 Replies Latest reply on Sep 7, 2007 1:14 PM by pmuir

    Seam philosophy and scalability...

    annbasso

      Hi there,
      I am evaluating Seam and trying to get the examples running. (Quite an exercise to get Seam 1.2.1 working on JBoss 4.2.1!!!...put this module in, remove that jar, tweak this tweak that...).

      In booking example it says, "Keeping conversational state in memory in the middle tier is a great way to improve your application's scalability." Further, it says that the search functionality is backed by stateful session bean and that bean caches the results of the search.

      Now, my question is this:
      We have an app that will be accessed by about 50000 people, about 1000 will be simultaneous users hitting the server. How well can this approach of creating stateful session beans scale? From what we understand is stateful SBs don't scale that well and on top of it Seam suggests to caches such data is SBs. Some performance experts suggest to not cache such data at all and rely on database chaching.


      Any thoughts on this?


      (BTW, password rules for registering on this site suck big time!!! What is it a credit card processing company???)

        • 1. Re: Seam philosophy and scalability...
          christian.bauer

           

          we understand is stateful SBs don't scale that well


          Maybe you should refresh that. Of course Websfear 1.0 doesn't scale.

          http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/StatefulSessionBeansRock

          • 2. Re: Seam philosophy and scalability...
            annbasso

            Thanks for pointing to the blog. However, the blog just says that it scales well, doesn't actually try to prove or show that it is indeed a myth.

            Of course, there has to be some state but shouldn't that be kept to a minimum? For example, in a standard shopping cart kind of application, you can have the cart items in the session. But to keep search results in the session? May be I am wrong, but it just seems too much.

            The comments on the blogs also don't seem too encouraging.

            • 3. Re: Seam philosophy and scalability...
              annbasso

               

              "annbasso" wrote:

              The comments on the blogs also don't seem too encouraging.


              I meant, comments on Gavin's blog refered before.

              • 4. Re: Seam philosophy and scalability...
                christian.bauer

                So don't keep your search result in the middle tier and build it from the database/session/cookies/request parameters/second-level Hibernate cache on every request. It's all up to you.

                • 5. Re: Seam philosophy and scalability...
                  pmuir

                   

                  "annbasso" wrote:
                  I am evaluating Seam and trying to get the examples running. (Quite an exercise to get Seam 1.2.1 working on JBoss 4.2.1!!!...put this module in, remove that jar, tweak this tweak that...).


                  Seam 1.2.1 is NOT aimed at 4.2.1 so no wonder its a hard ride!

                  (BTW, password rules for registering on this site suck big time!!! What is it a credit card processing company???)


                  Yes, we will have something better soon :)

                  As Christian says, Seam doesn't prohibit you from designing your app as you like. You'll notice different examples keep search results in different scopes (depending on your app the requirements change) e.g. booking in session, seamdiscs in the event scope.