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

Tomcat

[PacketMaster]

We've been using Tomcat in a production environment for 1 1/2 years and before that we were using Tomcat's predicessor JServ. It's been rock solid. 4.0 brought a lot of nice changes (like not overwriting the logs on startup!) and 4.1 is a refactoring release for performance. The one thing to keep in mind about Tomcat is that you have to write your own wrapper script/program to make Tomcat start up as a non-root user. If you're going to use it in conjunction with Apache, Apache2 will only work properly with the ajp13 connector. The webapp/warp connector doesn't seem to work properly yet.

If you're going to replace BEA though, consider looking at JBoss which is a true J2EE server unlike Tomcat which is just a servlet container. To replace a commercial product such as Weblogic, WebSphere or iPlanet, you want to look at JBoss for a complete J2EE/EJB solution.

Re:We don't get paid to do your job

[scawa]

They don't put Anonymous Coward on the "byline" for nothing. A forum is designed to get information. The purpose of her post was to get some information from people who knew their head from a hole in another part of their anatomy.

You obviously don't.

There are quite a few companies using Tomcat 4.0 or greater as a production JSP server and JBoss if they need EJB support.

However, there are faster web servers out there.

Resin and Jetty come to mind (use Google to find the Sites). Tomcat is a "reference" version of a JSP/Servlet Container. It is the first out of the gate... Others optimize stuff.

Tomcat 4.0 and above is scalable and clusterable, so you have the ability to do that, but so are several other open/source or less expensive Web Servers...

Check them out.

And idiots like the one above... If you can't be constructive.. Don't demonstrate your ignorance... just shut up.

Choosing Tomcat over others

[TheICEBear]

I come from a similar situation and have managed to do what you want to do. To sound a little zen don't try to change their minds just show them the benefits. In my case I drew on my knowledge on the lack of vendor lock-in combined with the economics of the situation and the inclusion of support in our seperate support contract (really cheap support at that).

As for support that was never really and issue with us so I have no argument there. Now Tomcat has some flaws (most in the JSP compiler Jasper and their live redeploy area), but is otherwise a very sweet little servlet engine (don't call it an appserver it isn't one in the J2EE sense of the word and that is the game you're playing when you use things like servlets).

Once it has compiled your JSPs it works just fine and the sweet things and the selling argument for our projects was redundancy of providers. You have a change of enviroments like going to another servlet engine. With a very minimal amount of care in your coding and everything is portable in fact if you stick to the Servlet/JSP api then you're good to go.

In fact we had some time one evening and switched between Tomcat, Resin and Jetty with only a few minutes spent making the configurations fit and the files unpack and install.

On a sidenote if you can delay any lock-in on a specific version of Tomcat, try and see if you can get your system over on the upcoming Tomcat 4.1 I am loving the improvements it brings esspecially in speed.

You should try to change his opinion on jBoss though. jBoss has been the most loved thing about that recent projects (and EJB writing is in combination with a good Ant script and XDoclet http://xdoclet.sourceforge.net not that big a pain). It is probably the most stable thing about this entire project with hot redeploy (great for development), good performance and great ease of use and install on top. In fact the new 3.x version is even greater with clustering, failover and some very interesting innovations in the area of control over which parts of the server to actually run via SARs and JMX. But enough about all this.

listen to his boss words

[imr]

to tune your answers.
he doesnt want to know what he can gain by using either of them, he wants to know he wont lose anything.

Re:Tomcat is bad but alternatives are even worse

[AftanGustur]

I'm no big fan of Apache (or its configuration nightmare specifically).

So the majority of webserver admins in the world are having a bad dream ?

Look, trying to use logic and something arguable to express your views is OK. But when you claim that the majority is stupid without any backing for your claims. It realy looks the other way.

Re:Tomcat does suck, avoid it.

[Turmio]

What the hell are you talking about?

You didn't mention what spec you mean but I think you meant that Tomcat implements Servlet, JSP etc. specs poorly?

I wonder what is your standard for poor but you can't get any better compliance than what you get with Tomcat namely it happens to be the official, Sub-blessed reference implementation of these very specs. If you're in doubt, then check these URLs: Java Servlet technology - Implementations ja Specifications at java.sun.com and Front page of Tomcat site. Thank you.

Re:Is Tomcat crap?

[_xeno_]

There are issues with that article that he doesn't mention. For example, what is his test page? Is he serving static content? Does he have Tomcat in "reload" mode (where it checks for updated code every time a servlet is executed)?

I can't help but think that this article is just poorly written. It doesn't really paint a clear picture of what he's using Tomcat for. He mentions nothing about the various configurations tested. It's way too easy to just write him off due to an overly evident bias against Tomcat from the beginning. (Hint: when attempting to persuade people, calling a benchmark test "Is Tomcat Crap?" reveals your bias...)

I use Tomcat at work as the development platform we use. We're probably going to be using Oracle Portal for the production system (not that I know what that is or what it uses for it's JSP engine, but...). It works fine for a development platform.

I haven't done any performance testing on it (yet), but when I get the chance, I might look into it. It'd be interesting to find out what my results are. I have a suspicision that Tomcat performed poorly in his "tests" because the other servlet engines came in an optimized for speed setting while Tomcat comes "optimized" for development.