Java and tomcat vs ASP.NET and IIS

Question

Until recently I'd considered myself to be a pretty good web programmer (coming up for 10yrs commercial experience on a variety of e-commerce, static and enterprise applications). I'm self taught and have always used the Microsoft product stack (ASP, ASP.NET)...

My applications are always functional, relatively bug free, but have never been lightening quick. As a frequent web user I always found this to be the norm... how fast are the websites from the big tech players (eBay, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Telerik etc etc) - in truth none are particularly fast. I always attributed this to "the way things are with web apps"...

...then I cam across a product called Jira from atlasian and this has stopped me in my tracks...

This application is fast, and I mean blindingly fast.. too fast to time the switches between pages, fully live content, lots of images and data and cross references etc etc...

I run this on an intranet, with a large application DB, and this is running on a very normal server (single processor, SATA HDD, 8GB RAM).

Am I missing something?? Are my programming techniques that bad?? I am wondering if this speed gain is down to it being written in Java and running on Tomcat.

Does anyone have any benchmarks to compare JSP / ASP or Tomcat / IIS???

Thanks, Mark

NOTE: this isn't a blatant plug for Jira. I don't work for them or have any affiliation to them... but I would like to be able to write applications like them :)

Answer 1

YMMV. But one of the longest-lived Things That Aren't True Anymore is the assertion that "Java Is Slow". Excepting floating-point (where most Java implementations aren't at liberty to use the floating-point hardware), Java is generally as fast or faster than compiled code. Some of the best and brightest have spent years of effort ensuring this, including such things as dynamic recompilation/re-optimization of code based on run-time metrics - something that statically-compiled languages like C or assembler cannot boast.

ASP is sort of the opposite extreme, since the original ASP had to recompile each page request each and every time it was made. ASPX addressed this by allowing retention of the compiled page code. That got rid of a lot of useless overhead.

A more compelling reason to prefer Java over ASPanything/IIS is freedom. A Java/Tomcat webapp will run under almost any OS on almost any hardware. IIS runs on Windows. Period. And for the most part, that also means Intel. Not Sparc, Not zSeries. Maybe you don't care. But then again, maybe next week IBM will offer your employer a can't-refuse deal on a mainframe.

I don't have benchmarks, and there are a lot of things that can make one platform preferable. But I permanently gave up on the "Java is slow" idea when I encountered the Poseidon UML tool with its cool real-time graphics UI and the FreeMind mindmapper tool. A small hit to startup the JVM, but after that, you'd never know what language you were working under.

Answer 2

The great debate. Java vs. .Net.

When .Net first came out there was an application written called "The Pet Shop." Which was a .Net port of Sun's J2EE reference application, "The Pet Store". It was announced that Microsoft's implementation was "faster."

As with anything, especially anything to do with marketing, you have to dig deeper to find the truth.

Any technology can be fast with enough hardware and the correct design. In my experience there are two factors to speed: What type of hardware is used and how you architect your application (this includes database tuning).

Answer 3

Caching at various levels (response, db, etc.) makes a huge different in responsiveness of a web application. There is also a lot of things that are done to reduce time consuming operations like db connection pooling, sql statement caching, etc. As much as I'd like to say Java is better :-), I think in this case the performance is due to the way Jira was written and the fact that it's being run internally (probably with few users as compared to eBay, Facebook, Microsoft). This site, Stackoverflow, uses ASP.NET MVC and IIS and is very responsive and my guess (since code is not open sourced, yet) is that they use many of the same techniques you would find in Jira or any other web application built to scale.

Answer 4

I think that it is not typically the frameworks and languages used that make an application slow. In my experience, some frameworks like JSF or .NET server side controls give developers alot of freedom to make too many database calls and look things up too often, but that's definitely not the fault of the framework used.

Keep your application as light as possible and focus on keeping the data sent to the client as small as possible, and you will have a fast application. It's usually faster to develop fast applications too.

The Jira folks have written a best in class application (and charge for it) - nice work crocodile dundees.

Answer 5

I also suggest to consider also two aspects:

• the maintenance activities: logging and deployment. In my opinion under a unix like server is more easier to log, deploy, and maintain new release than doing the same on a Windows server.
• if the project require to use some open source application (ie Alfresco repository) Java is better solutions

Answer 6

People's opinion is mostly biased. Most people have never really tried the other while claiming the other is slower. I wouldn't trust any answer: it's mere opinion. It's boring to always read the same 4 cents again and again.