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

My company uses tomcat exclusively

[Tet]

Like the subject says. It seems to work OK for us. Startup times are annoyingly slow. If we need to deploy a new context, then restarting tomcat brings with it a 30-45 second outage. But other than that, it's fine. Performance testing showed that increasing the number of threads the connectors can handle, and increasing the memory size (we use -Xmx500M) helps enormously.

Re:My company uses tomcat exclusively

[flipperboy]

My experience is almost exactly the same. We started using tomcat during development because it was free, and found that it performed well enough that we were confident moving into production with it. Restart times are not an issue for us; we can schedule resource drops for times when system use is minimized.

During load testing, we mucked about with the same tomcat parameters mentioned above, specifically thread count (starting and max) and heap size.

One last note: with versions 4.x of Tomcat, we've found that Tomcat is quick enough at serving up static content that we don't need to put Apache into the mix.

Novell

[Scutter]

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.

JBoss !

[FullClip]

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 :)

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.

Re:Tomcat is bad but alternatives are even worse

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

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.

weather.com is now exclusively Tomcat

[nevermind]

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.

Re:BEA is buggy as hell anyhow.....

[JThaddeus]

Amen! I have been forced to run BEA and it has been agony. Plenty of things that run under Tomcat won't under WebLogic. IMHO, this just plain wrong! Afterall, isn't Tomcat the *reference* implementation? Examples:

6.0SP2 would not honor VariableInfo.NESTED in custom tag libraries

6.1 requires the weblogic.xml file in your WAR. Huh? Why in the WAR?

6.1 will hang for 30 seconds on your servlets if you open and close the stream without sending anything on the stream

6.1SP2 to set the proper application CLASSPATH

6.1SP3 fails to handle code that translates a SAX2 event stream to HTML using Xerces (SAX2) and Xalan (XSL); I'm dead in the water with this because our application depends on SAX2 streams

Honestly, I think I have spent more time tryiing to make WebLogic work than it took to write the application in the first place!

Try Resin

[peterdaly]

I run two production Servlet Containers. One is Tomcat 4.X, the other is on Resin. While Resin is not open source, the cost is only $500/server, which is quite low by J2EE standards. I believe it is free for development, but I could be wrong.

I tried Resin since I have heard "buzz" about it in message forums, and now can't say enough about it myself. Tomcat has a lot of quirks with reloading updated war files, reloading modified JSP's, etc. Resin does not have these problems, and I believe is much better suited for a non-stop production envirnment.

In Tomcat, it is not uncommon for me to have to restart the container when rolling out updates where certain things have changed. In Resin, I can even add or remove a JDBC Connection Pool from the resin.conf file and have to pool rolled out or back without any additional intervention from me. In short, it just works. Not only does it work well as far a few (if any) glitches, it is VERY fast as well.

For a commercial envirnment, I suggest you try Resin just to see if you find the value it adds over Tomcat worth it for you. I did.

-Pete

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.

Complementary

[Martin Spamer]

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.