The breaking point
What does it take for us to be able to categorically say that something has failed? Plenty of people seem intent on sounding the death knell for EJB’s, for example. They in all seriousness suggest Sun just drop them (thank god for standards). Why is nobody suggesting for example that tomcat just be dropped? Why can’t the community at large just shrug and admit that letting Craig Mcclalalanasomethingortheother make any sort of decision that affects other people was a bad idea, and quietly drop JSF? Why can’t we concede that JUnit was not designed for what it’s being used for today, and drop it in favour of something that’s a bit more relevant to real tests instead of childish assertEquas(1+1, 2)?
February 18th, 2004 at 12:16 pm
> Why is nobody suggesting for example
> that tomcat just be dropped?
Because it works fine. Witness SemWebCentral, happily serving 8000 pages a day on Tomcat 5. Bah!
February 18th, 2004 at 12:20 pm
> Instead, they just listen to the monkeys
> who tell them how great maven is.
Because they can. They don’t have paying customers screaming at them their shit sucks. So you ignore those bastards. Path of least resistance. And you’re happy with the crowd that keeps telling you you’re wonderful. They’re happy, your doing them a service, so why care about the whiney Suleiman screaming at the corner?
After all, they started the whole thing to create something for themselves. If they’re still happy with it, all is great. If someone else likes it too, it’s a bonus! And damn the rest.
February 18th, 2004 at 12:22 pm
8000 pages a day, ohmigod what a truly awesome number, not. I am doing performance testing on an application which uses Tomcat and it sucks. Just testing the tomcat index page is bad and no it’s not hardware/network/database/etc it’s tomcat.
Tomcat is a great tool for developing with but once you’re done get a proper server.
February 18th, 2004 at 12:46 pm
Heck, if you only need 8000 pages a day, and Tomcat works, then more power to you. I even use Windows for file service if I have less than 100 files and none of them exceed 1MB and I don’t have more than one concurrent user and I don’t have to administer security and I don’t need the box to be up all the time. Everybody’s happy nowadays ..
February 18th, 2004 at 1:19 pm
Why would they stop? That’d be like you’d stop blogging because some guys complain. And at least, some of them make money out of it. And generally, the least likely thing to break is stupidity anyway.
February 18th, 2004 at 2:43 pm
Yes, Yes, Yes… DEATH to EJBs, DEATH to JBOSS, and MOST of all DEATH to WEBSPHERE. These are the worst horror ever unleashed on the software community…If I could dangle their ape-brained architects by their balls while I shoved a long rectangular ruler up their tight a-holes i might be able to give them a taste of the torture they have inflicted on us poor folk.
February 18th, 2004 at 2:47 pm
new plugin. slang fart:
a turd honking for the right
of way. thanks jjava.
February 18th, 2004 at 3:16 pm
>Why can’t we concede that JUnit was not designed
>for what it’s being used for today, and drop it in
>favour of something that’s a bit more relevant to
>real tests instead of childish assertEquas(1+1, 2)?
What is the problem with JUnit? Just because some people insist of using it to test that 1+1==2 doesn’t mean it can be used well.
We use it to test client commands into out server. Basically, have a setUp() method that cleans the database, starts the server and a client, then run commands and verify that the behaviour is correct. I believe the TDD people call that “integration testing”. I call that “useful testing” and JUnit works very well for that. What do you suggest should be changed?
February 18th, 2004 at 3:19 pm
“The more person A has invested in this technology, the more he or she will fight tooth and nail to hold onto it, and the more excuses will be made for it.”
Sounds like Nard and Together.
February 18th, 2004 at 3:24 pm
I suppose you don’t have any specific suggestions for how to improve JUnit, for example? Besides, what do you consider “real tests”? Functional tests?
February 18th, 2004 at 4:06 pm
8000 pages per day? that’s 5.5 pages per minute. Hahah, tomcat is sooooo crap.
February 18th, 2004 at 4:23 pm
I serve around 35,000 pages a day off a Tomcat 4.1.x installation for a Financial Services company with an uptime of about 99.9%. Peak load is just over a page a second when averaged over one hour periods, all database driven web applications. There is a good chance of apples and oranges but I would be fascinated to know how far other people have scaled Tomcat. Our installation seems fine so far. Anyone care to share any more numbers.
February 18th, 2004 at 4:26 pm
luxor anyone?
February 18th, 2004 at 4:40 pm
Rickard: one page per second? You must be joking. At least test the throughput of your app and post THAT number. And while you’re at it, try the same app on Resin or Orion and see how much faster it is.
February 18th, 2004 at 5:07 pm
“There isn’t a hugh and cry from the maven camp about their fundamental flaws and how to address them. Instead, they just listen to the monkeys who tell them how great maven is. ”
As long as their is an audience than there will be a performer. Regardless if Maven is great or not there are monkeys who love it therefore the Maven team can keep on going. This happens ALL THE TIME in the real world. Ya it is sad. I or anyone could spew out all day examples of this happening. Maven isn’t pushing it, those monkeys are pulling it.
February 18th, 2004 at 5:25 pm
I want to share with you a very deep concern I have about Marc Fleury. Let me begin by saying that you, of course, now need some hard evidence that Fleury undoubtedly needs to stop living in a fool’s paradise. Well, how about this for evidence: He has stated that factionalism is a viable and vital objective for our nation’s educational institutions. That’s just pure sadism. Well, in Fleury’s case, it might be pure ignorance, seeing that Fleury’s cause is not glorious. It is not wonderful. It is not good. Something that I have heard repeated several times from various sources — a sort of “tag line” for Fleury — is, “We should go out and besmirch the memory of some genuine historic figures. And when we’re done with that, we’ll all seize control of the power structure.” This is not a direct quote, nor have I heard it from Fleury’s lips directly, but several sources have paraphrased the content to me in near-enough ways that I feel fairly confident it actually was said. And to be honest, I have no trouble believing it. Will his asinine, bitter confreres send the wrong message to children? Only time will tell.
In a recent essay, he stated that we should avoid personal responsibility. Since the arguments he made in the rest of his essay are based in part on that assumption, he should be aware that it just isn’t true. Not only that, but implying that paltry moral weaklings make the best scout leaders and schoolteachers is no different from implying that the laws of nature don’t apply to him. Both statements are ludicrous. Everybody is probably familiar with the cliche that Fleury’s hijinks should be recognized, but only as a complete fraud. Well, there’s a lot of truth in that cliche. My eventual goal for this letter is to embark on a new path towards change. I’m counting on you for your support.
February 18th, 2004 at 5:36 pm
maven, while flawed, kicks the crap out of ant unless you’ve had lots of practice and lots of time to build your custom scripts (almost any time anyone mentions a multiproject ant build it involves adding some horror technology like xslt to cope. in maven, it’s “maven multiproject”). and to all you “i’m an ant genius”‘s out there, i’ve been forced to try and incorporate your build scripts into our continuous integration system and they’re shit. maven works to suppress that kind of “creativity”.
tdd works for me.
how much ejb’s suck compares favourably with the US budget deficit. use the hibernate + spring + favourite web framework combination for more than 10 minutes and it becomes pretty clear that waiting 5 minutes for all your .ear files to build is seriously eating into unmentionable tugging time.
JUnit is great and if there was anything out there that was meaningfully superior a whole lot of people would have defected to it by now. For writing IntegrationTests, it would be nice to have a ConfigurableTestCase. The Jetty trick is pretty neat whatever kind of tests those end up being.
Tomcat is pants.
February 18th, 2004 at 5:43 pm
Last time I checked we were serving ~3 million hits a day off of a tomcat 4 instance… So paws off tomcat.
February 18th, 2004 at 5:51 pm
Is “pants” a compliment or an insult?
February 18th, 2004 at 5:57 pm
You know, I just caught myself looking through the BileBlog comments specifically to see if the requisite chiara-Mark-Fleury post had been entered yet! ;-)
February 18th, 2004 at 6:23 pm
We served 1,012,705 requests yesterday for webmail.ufl.edu with Tomcat 5. At peak usage we were pushing 19.965 hits a second. Tomcat can hold it’s own despite our app’s current poor performance.
February 18th, 2004 at 6:26 pm
unmentionables == underwear == pants (common british vernacular)… so i guess it depends whether they’re yours or natalie portman’s…
in tomcat’s case, they’re craig maclaughlan pants after a few too many all nighters trying to work out how to convince everyone that the JSF isn’t struts with even more concrete classes, random xml configuration files and reflection based procedural programming dressed up as a web application framework.
February 18th, 2004 at 9:55 pm
Chiara, why don’t you poo on your own blog?
Why are you pooing here, and don’t let anyone poo on your blog?
Poo you Chiara! Now punch my clown… would ya.
February 18th, 2004 at 11:48 pm
8000 whole pages? Oh my, just look at that enormous level of traffic! Do you have illegal immigrants manually entering the binary digits for each packet as it’s sent back to the client — at that level of traffic, it might be feasible!
February 19th, 2004 at 12:41 am
Tomcat – 4 Gigs of data / Day ; 30 pages / sec all dynamic with lots of processing.
My little rant, someone needs to bitch-slap around the original “visionaries” of JSP and everyone who thinks JSP’s are not retarded.
February 19th, 2004 at 2:40 am
” Person A selects a particular technology. Said technology will turn out not to be that great. The more person A has invested in this technology, the more he or she will fight tooth and nail to hold onto it, and the more excuses will be made for it.”
My God Hani! You have expressed it perfectly with such accurate and beautyful words: “The story of J2EE (Java in the enterprise) so far”.
Person(s) A are all the managers and IT infrastructure guys in the world who have been feeding the Java hype during the last 8 years.
February 19th, 2004 at 3:31 am
Tomcat sucks, and so does Struts. But hey, they have made me famous!
February 19th, 2004 at 3:48 am
Boxed,
Throughput is 1.5GB/day of dynamic content, I had to go and check. All the static content is served by Apache and I don’t bother logging how much of that goes out.
sandymac,
Thanks for posting the stats page. Looks like 272,072 pages/day though, right?
February 19th, 2004 at 4:15 am
I vote to kill JSPs too and all JSP technologies (struts etc). Also I will defend EJBs. Session EJBs are perfectly fine if your application has need of it. We use them to front command pattern and the domain persistence via Hibernate.
Maven IS a retarded monkey, that’s why retarded monkey circle-jerk on it.
February 19th, 2004 at 4:24 am
Rickard: aah, that’s more like it. Now, what the peak performance of this app runnning on tomcat? and what’s the peak performance of the same up under resin or orion?
February 19th, 2004 at 5:23 am
Boxed,
If I knew that or had the time to find out, I wouldn’t be asking for other people’s experience here :)
February 19th, 2004 at 6:20 am
CHIARA – you just don’t seem to get it..do you? You are a one deranged fucked up individual.
February 19th, 2004 at 7:03 am
Boxed,
It’s Richard damnit! Richard!
February 19th, 2004 at 7:39 am
I take back my apology of yesterday. Chiara IS a boring bitch. Unfunny too.
February 19th, 2004 at 8:28 am
YAC: “someone needs to bitch-slap around the original “visionaries” of JSP and everyone who thinks JSP’s [sic] are not retarded.”
I don’t think JSPs are retarded. The Apache implementation of JSPs sucks (and of course no one wrote their own — they all stole the shite Apache code,) but the original _design_ for JSP is OK.
February 19th, 2004 at 9:08 am
“Boxed: aah, that’s more like it. Now, what the peak performance of this app runnning on tomcat? and what’s the peak performance of the same up under resin or orion?”
Don’t know. But how about a synthetic benchmark: PEAK_PERFORMANCE/COST_OF_SERVER?
It gets near infinite for Tomcat.
February 19th, 2004 at 10:10 am
Hibernate is now under the JBoss umbrella – you are guilty of supreme treachery!
February 19th, 2004 at 10:23 am
freak said:
” how about a synthetic benchmark: PEAK_PERFORMANCE/COST_OF_SERVER?
It gets near infinite for Tomcat.”
Actually, it doesn’t. In real life (not in Toy Land) you’d factor in the cost of the server (hardware AND software) and you’d find that Resin would still kick the shit out of Tomcat.
PS I use Jetty, so don’t call me a Resin Lover.
February 19th, 2004 at 12:19 pm
Toy App Maker … actually you wouldn’t always factor in the cost of the server because in many cases you would already have a server performing another task that you would use, in which case the cost/performance of Tomcat is high. I would however agree that Tomcat has serious limitations when compared with other equivalent offerings. Web systems have basic requirements, and parametrics like requests/hour would often eliminate Tomcat from the party straight away. It needs punching. So does Mcclanablamealan for starting it.
February 19th, 2004 at 12:42 pm
How many pages per second can Marc Fleury serve?
February 19th, 2004 at 1:48 pm
Bwaahhaha….he serves them so fast that spittle starts frothing at his oral orifice.
February 19th, 2004 at 2:17 pm
Cameron, I must disagree…. JSP’s design is just sucky from the inside out.
Many / most of the commercial vendors have their own JSP implementation (IBM being a notable exception since copying Jasper meant they could spend more time making the rest of WebSphere suck more…). They all have (different) interpretations of tag handler reuse which may, or may not, be compatible with one or more of the JSP specs. Of course, there’s plenty of wiggle room in the specs for more than one completely different interpretation to both “comply” with the spec.
The whole thing is just ill conceived from the get-go. Why this object based class representation with (humonguous) code generation instead of a nice, fast, simple templating solution like Velocity, FreeMarker, etc? We had better than JSP when I was doing ColdFusion development 7 years ago…
February 19th, 2004 at 2:42 pm
blah blah blah, lots of hot air and buzzwords, but no substantial complaints about JSP. That doubletalk is fine on job interviews with HR droids but against real geeks it don’t play. Well-done JSP with most code not in the page is just fine.
February 19th, 2004 at 4:16 pm
I personally don’t understand the Tomcat bashing, but whatever. We have a Linux/Intel/3Ghz/1Gb webhotel server running 57 websites (about ~10 of which are high-profile, high-load sites) with currently 14.600 pages and the CPU is yawning most of the time. Works for me.
February 19th, 2004 at 4:36 pm
How’s this for an instant coronary, Hani?
“Open-source software company JBoss Group has secured $10 million in venture financing, the company announced on Thursday.”
February 19th, 2004 at 4:39 pm
Marc has already promised me a brand new Ferrari Testarossa. So while you spew hatred through your beige keyboard, I’ll be racing the streets of Monte Carlo.
Have a nice life :-)
February 19th, 2004 at 6:03 pm
ROTFLMAO! Everbody has shut up now! All the little boys having wet dreams about Natalie in a Testarossa
February 19th, 2004 at 6:14 pm
Wait ’til they read the fine print on that $10M. Money is never free. When the VC scum bags are through, Marc will lose his chest hair and sing only the high notes, and nobody will hear him fart.
February 19th, 2004 at 6:16 pm
Sorry Natalie but a Ferrari Testarossa has nothing on a McLaren F1 (http://tinyurl.com/2odot).
February 19th, 2004 at 6:22 pm
I prefer the Testarossa, myself.
February 19th, 2004 at 8:05 pm
Tiny URLs for tiny brains.
February 19th, 2004 at 8:16 pm
LOL, “anonymous” for people who need to hide?
February 19th, 2004 at 8:56 pm
Let’s get rid of Java while we’re getting rid of stuff, OK?
Isn’t the benefit of Java is that we have tons of stuff to choose from…all free? OK, Maven sucks, tomcat sucks, JSP sucks, Bile blog comments suck. It’s all free! In .NET, you usually have one choice for everything. If there are multiple choices, you have to pay for them.
Newsflash – we don’t live in a perfect world. Quit bitching and get to work.
February 19th, 2004 at 9:07 pm
Richard (not Rickard): Actually the request for pages number is very low, all of the struts actions (*.do) are not counted as pages as but they are what really does the work. Maybe I’ll see about getting our analog configuration updated.
February 19th, 2004 at 9:38 pm
My company serves upwards of 250,000 highly dynamic pages/day on a dual PIII 733MHz 1GB RAM Linux server with Tomcat 4.1.x on a 1.4.2 Sun JVM. The output of ‘w’ never goes above .25. Simultaneous sessions ranges from 800 to 2000 depending on the time of day.
You guys bashing Tomcat are either screwing the setup pretty badly or simply don’t know what you’re taling about. Now Struts is another story :)
February 20th, 2004 at 7:32 am
Anonymous idiot: 173 pages/second isn’t impressive.
February 20th, 2004 at 9:41 am
I’ve got tom cat with a 4Ghz action that serves 3 million she-cats a day with plenty of ram in it. Just purrs along. He struts as well. And hibernates frequently. What’s wrong with tom cats?
February 20th, 2004 at 11:12 am
Just post a tomcat/orion benchmark and be done with it already.
February 20th, 2004 at 2:54 pm
Hani,
This is my first comment to your blog. First of all, I think you are funny as hell, and actually right sometimes. However, all unmentionable-tugging aside, I gotta differ with you on a couple of these.
As for Maven, it saves me from writing a lot of useless and boring Ant code, and I find the reports and plugins useful. It may suck in some ways, but it’s better than the alternative IMHO.
As for TDD, it makes my coding more fun, I write less bugs, and I end up with a better design. That’s all it took to convince me :)
Your milage may vary, of course. Keep up the ranting!
Chad Woolley
February 20th, 2004 at 6:18 pm
I can spell my own name, and sorry I don’t drive and have never had any urge to drive a Ferrari Testosterossa (however that is spelled).
Cheers,
Nathalie
February 20th, 2004 at 8:49 pm
As long as it’s not a minivan or a station wagon ..
February 20th, 2004 at 10:41 pm
You dumb-fucks who are bashing tomcat and junit remind me of middle school when the cool band became so popular that it wasn’t cool to like it anymore. Its like your Hani’s little group of followers following him around the playground while he makes fun of everyone else.
February 21st, 2004 at 2:06 am
Mr cocka-face, I really have to congratulate you on your name. Did your parents not like you or something ?
February 21st, 2004 at 11:20 am
At least he didn’t post anonymously. That takes guts.
February 21st, 2004 at 3:10 pm
You’re just jealous cause we get to sit at Hani’s lunch table and you have to sit over with the JBoss dweebs.
February 21st, 2004 at 5:05 pm
“I serve around 35,000 pages a day off a Tomcat 4.1.x installation for a Financial Services company with an uptime of about 99.9%. ”
Wow! The Financial Services company doesn’t mind over 80 hours of down time a year!? Hope it’s not time critical data you’re hosting.
Most financial firms I’ve dealt with cringe at anything under 5 nines.
February 21st, 2004 at 9:39 pm
Waz, stop tugging at your unmentionables next time you whip out your calculator, 99.9% uptime is 8.76 hours a year, not over 80 hours.
February 21st, 2004 at 11:25 pm
Heh, Oops. Got carried away. Was laughing too hard I guess. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone in the financial services arena brag about 3 nines.
February 22nd, 2004 at 1:10 pm
> It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone in
>the financial services arena brag about 3 nines.
Its been a long time since I have seen weekend trading in the financial sector…. like maybe never.
Every financial firm has weekend downtime…
How many 9′s is that?
-Moo
February 22nd, 2004 at 5:09 pm
Boxed wrote:
“Anonymous idiot: 173 pages/second isn’t impressive.”
Boxed idiot: The point is not for the page throughput to be …impressive, it is for it to be ENOUGH to get the job done.
What’s this with App Server “impressive-ness”? Do you want to compensate for something you have lacking you have in other areas, maybe?
February 22nd, 2004 at 7:36 pm
Planned downtime is not included in standard uptime ratings. At least no where that I’ve seen. Also, not every financial firm has weekend downtime. Not every market has weekend downtimes.
I know several firms that’ll show you the door if you talk about 3 nines. It’s not something to brag about in the real world.
February 23rd, 2004 at 8:27 am
Downtime is very important issue for us. Consequently we included scheduled downtime into our uptime percentage statistics. As you can imagine that makes 3 nines a lot harder to achieve. We also have weekend usage although at a much lower level than during the week.
February 23rd, 2004 at 8:06 pm
Waz: “I know several firms that’ll show you the door if you talk about 3 nines. It’s not something to brag about in the real world.”
And there a LOT of other firms that don’t give a f**k, if they have a 1 or 2 nines. Your industry is not the only one there is.
So shut the f**k up.
You’re not fun anymore.
February 25th, 2004 at 12:12 am
Heh, 1 or 2? OK. You said it all. Thanks for playing.
February 25th, 2004 at 8:58 am
“Heh, 1 or 2? OK. You said it all. Thanks for playing.”
What a professional! I bet your systems have 24/7 downtime.
February 25th, 2004 at 12:20 pm
Wow, you guys have nines? Please let me have some nines!!!
February 27th, 2004 at 7:51 am
She told me that she wanted six nines .. I said I could do that.
February 28th, 2004 at 4:21 am
wow mike you’re so cool, you’re my hero
March 16th, 2004 at 7:00 pm
That what ‘we’ strive for :)
March 16th, 2004 at 7:06 pm
That what ‘we’ strive for :)