Who is Using Tomcat or Jetty in Production?

JettyCatReady queries: "Ok, my company (a rather large, global financial institution) has recently blessed Linux for production use (woohoo!). Their position is that it will save them hardware costs to run on Intel machines instead of big IBM or Sun iron. No mention at all has been made of their position on open source. I'm part of a team that wants to make the case that the real savings are to be made by making use of things like Tomcat in place of BEA where we can (if all we want is JSP why pay a huge cost per server?). I even have a boss's boss who said in front of me, 'So I'm thinking, am I missing something by not using Tomcat? Do I have anything to lose?'"

"These are all excellent signs. The next step is to get an open source server into production. Tomcat is the natural choice because it's got the name recognition among Java app servers. Here's where I'm a little stumped. Whenever I mention the words 'Tomcat' and 'production' together, performance junkies come out of the woodwork and tell me that Tomcat sucks for production (what with it being a reference implementation and not optimized for speed). They say use Jetty (except for the ones that say to use Resin). The counter argument is that if my managers have heard of Tomcat, and seen vendors that will support Tomcat, and have never heard of Jetty, then there's no way they're going to bless it over Tomcat. (The same boss who praised Tomcat above also made a face when I mentioned JBoss. And I'm sure it has nothing to do with his personal experience with either.)

My question is, does anybody have some real world numbers of large institutions actually using these servers in a production environment? If somebody can tell me 'Company X uses Tomcat exclusively' then we would have no problem contacting company X and saying, 'So, what have your experiences been?' In other words I need leads, not actual white papers (although those would be nice, too). I need some real experiences, not just people who like Jetty over Tomcat because they don't like Sun."

Comments

Why not consider Orion?

[Clay Mitchell]

I've seen a couple mentions of it, but here's a full fledged endorsement. If you hang out in #java in efnet, they pretty much unanimously recommend Orion or Resin, with the majority going to Orion. I've been using it for 6 months now.

It's ridiculously easy to set up (moreso than Resin)

it's fast, faster than weblogic/tomcat/resin

it's stable (I've had it running it (http://www.squabble.org) for that 6 months execpt when I moved it's server a couple months ago)

it's cheap. It's not free (as in beer or as in source) but it's a heckuva lot cheaper than Weblogic, and the development licenses are free.

for those of you who don't like Tomcat's start up times, it takes all of about 5 seconds to launch and you can redeploy a webapp simply by touching it's web.xml

Anyway, it's a great app. Give it a look.