Raible Designs

GlassFish 2 vs. Tomcat 6

In Switched, Dave says:

Now that Glassfish V2 is out I'm switching from Tomcat to Glassfish for all of my development. It's more than fast enough. With Glassfish on my MacBook Pro, Roller restart time is about 8 seconds compared to 16 with Tomcat. And the quality is high; the admin console, the asadmin command-line utility and the docs are all excellent. The dog food is surprisingly tasty ;-)

I did some brief and very non-scientific performance comparisons myself:

Startup Time with no applications deployed:

• Tomcat 6: 3 seconds
• GlassFish 2: 8 seconds

Startup Time with AppFuse 2.0 (Struts + Hibernate version) as a WAR

• Tomcat 6: 15 seconds
• GlassFish 2: 16 seconds

Environment:

• JAVA_OPTS="-Xms768M -Xmx768M -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Djava.awt.headless=true -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -server"
• OS X 10.4.10, 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Since this was a very non-scientific experiment, it's possible the last two are actually the same. It's strange that Dave is seeing Roller startup twice as fast on GlassFish. Maybe they've done some Roller deployment optimization?

I realize startup times aren't that important. However, as Dave mentions, they (and context reloading) can be extremely important when developing.

Update: I got to thinking that Dave is probably referring to context reloading. Here's a comparison of how long it takes for both servers to pick up a new WAR (and start the application) when it's dropped into their autodeploy directories.

• Tomcat 6: 14-16 seconds
• GlassFish 2: 9 seconds

The strange thing about Tomcat is it takes 6-8 seconds to recognize a new WAR has been deployed. Does Tomcat have a polling increment that can be increased during development?

Regardless, it's impressive that the GlassFish guys have made things that much faster for developers. Nice work folks!

These days, I try to use mvn jetty:run on projects. Then I don't have to worry about deploying, just save and wait for the reload. Time to wait for AppFuse 2.0 to reload using the Maven Jetty Plugin (version 6.1.5)? 7 seconds. Of course, it'd be nice if I could somehow get this down to 1 or 2 seconds.

Maybe Dave should use the Maven integration for Roller to decrease his reload times. ;-)