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Who is Using Tomcat or Jetty in Production?
"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."
Can't give our company name but we're using it in production for an ASP-type senario serving apps to large financial institutions off of WinNT boxes. Compared to the previous IIS builds (ugh) it's wonderful, stable and a nice advert for taking the whole show over to UNIX.
Novell's Groupwise version 6 runs on Tomcat with Apache. It's actually set up to run on Netware, of course, but I've gotten it running quite nicely on linux as well.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Take a look at JBoss, we replaced BEA with it for commercial product deploys and have been thrilled. It can also be integrated with Tomcat or Jetty.
We use a BEA app server at work for our order processing system. Generally it works ok, but serious bugs in it cause us a lot of greif and downtime. First off it has serious memory leaks in the performance pack (trading speed for stability). We have to boot the BEA app server at least once a week least it runs out of memory and crashes. We are currently looking at JBOSS as our new production application server due to it's stability. If you code smartly you can move the code back and forth so you really have nothing to loose....
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JBoss is an excellent fullfledged J2EE application server.
:)
They even offer consultancy if you cannot get it right the first time.
Excellent award winning server, excellent support, what do you need more ?
It has Jetty integrated and gives you the full J2EE stack.
You can get it to work with Tomcat too: no problem.
Check it out, the design is awesome for the techies.
The support option is great for the management.
Everyone's happy
Having said that, Tomcat on the back end means Apache on the web tier
Why? Tomcat can be used stand-alone and it can be integrated with other webservers, even IIS!
We have migrated to Linux, Apache, and Tomcat over the last year-and-a-half. We use it both in development and in production, across 100 or so boxes. As with everything, there are issues, but for the most part we are very happy. Even most commercial vendor's idea of a "big" site doesn't come close to what we do, so we have found very little difference between problem solving in the open-source and closed-source worlds.
For what we do, you can't beat the price... And yes, that includes the price of our time.
"If we need to deploy a new context, then restarting tomcat brings with it a 30-45 second outage."
Remember, in 4.x, a command-line admin tool to insert/reload contexts at runtime has been added. A GUI is planned to follow.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Resin is significantly faster than tomcat. Catalina (Tomcat 4.x) has close the gap somewhat but if they still have a long way to go. OTOH, if cheap / stable is all you need then Catalina is a great way to go. FYI, Resin comes with all the source but is not free. Any of the EJB server will be total overkill and the overhead will soak you. And Websphere (at least the servlet side) is based on Tomcat (as is JBoss).
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss and J2ee App-Servers. They are not really competative but complementary products. A Java AppServer is composed of [at least] three main components. The HTTP deamon, a Servlet/JSP container and a EJB Container.
Jetty is a primarily HTTP deamon, it is designed to handle HTTP request in a scalable manner.
Tomcat is a Servlet/JSP container, it implements the Servlet API it provides limited HTTP handling and no EJB support. Tomcat is highly reliable more so than most commercial 'industrial strength' App Servers. On the performance side; the Tomcat 3.x architecture is not hot but is adequate for many applications, all but the heaviest loads. Tomcat 4.x is significant better in this regard, because it includes an enhanced HTTP deamon.
JBoss is an EJB container which uses Tomcat 4.0 as it's HTTP deamon and Servlet container.
If speed your concern for static content, put TUX in front of tomcat. No config changes are necessary for tomcat and TUX can saturate gigabit ethernet adapters easily and with comparatively little CPU overhead (more CPU free for tomcat to handle the dynamic stuff).
You can read more about TUX here.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.