Should A High-Profile Media Website Abandon Java?

newbroom asks: "The company I work for runs a large, high-profile web site with users all across the world and delivers them large amounts of streaming media content plus textual stories. You might guess therefore that this is a news website, frequently updated throughout the day, and delivering content 24x365. No names, or course, for obvious reasons. We have a big, custom, Java content management system (based on a framework from a proprietary vendor as it happens, but could just as well be EJB/J2EE for all that it matters in the context of this argument) and for deployment we run our website using Java app servers on Solaris behind Apache." If you were going to take such a site from 1000 users, to 10,000 users, would you be able to do it using this kind of setup?

"It is all hugely expensive to license and to run, and it's not very scalable. We'd like to up our userbase from several tens of thousands to ten times that number - but the cost of scaling the Java/Solaris infrastructure is not trivial, because the Java servlet architecture costs too much in memory and execution time (creating several 100Ks of in memory objects for each logon is expensive stuff!). On current hardware we can support only 1200-1500 concurrent logins and scaling up requires a new app server (eg 1 processor + 1GB RAM) and a $20K software license for each additional 600-750 concurrent logged in users. And in today's 'cost per active subscriber' economics it doesn't add up - we cannot justify the present cost structure, by any rational measure, even before we try to scale it up.

So we're thinking of chucking it out and replacing it with a largely static site that is generated (written out to cache) from a new, simpler content management system. The few dynamic elements would be assembled using simple PHP scripts, frontending our existing Oracle DB server. We reckon we could serve vastly higher numbers, ten to a hundred times as many, of users on the same (or cheaper!) hardware: and it would be simpler by far to build and maintain and support.

I, personally, believe that the benefits of the Java system (rapid prototyping, development) are not important when large scale deployment is the issue. I am (as a user) fed up with large, poorly performing Java-based websites. My beef is not about Java the language though - it's a question of appropriateness. Fifteen years ago we'd prototype in Smalltalk and then code for deployment in C, and I feel the same applies here. The economics of the noughties do NOT support spending massive amounts of money on web infrastructure, unless the transactional revenue justifies it. Of course, most businesses generally don't justify it, in my opinion.

Our outsourcing partner who supports and maintains the architecture thinks we are crazy. Putting their potential loss of revenue aside they are hugely concerned that we'll not be able to support what we create. They are seriously against this idea.

I remember, prior to Java & the like, supporting simple CGI websites with tens & hundreds of thousands of users off of cheap FreeBSD systems, and we didn't have to pay an outsourced partner to do it.

So what does Slashdot think? What would you do if you, were in the same boat?"

Comments

Your problem is architecture

[DevilM]

Seems like your problem is one of architecture and not the underlying platform. You suggest that you would move away from a dynamic site built with J2EE to a generated static site built with PHP. If you really feel having a generated static site is the best way to go then why not leverage your existing Java infrastructure and have it generate a static site instead of server a dynamic one? And if you can levarge your existing code base for that, then writing a new code base could still be done in Java, so I am not sure why you are pointing to Java as the problem.

With all the above being said, I don't know what is wrong with your system, but it isn't that hard to build a dynamic site in Java that meets your scabilitiy needs. All you need is a good caching strategy and you are set. Generally speaking, a good caching strategy coupled with a dynamic site can lead to as good as or better peformance than a static site.

yes, switch

[consumer]

It doesn't have to be to PHP, it could just be to an open source Java platform, but get off your expensive proprietary platform before it drives you into the ground. Java has good enough performance when done well, but most commercial Java frameowrks make it hard or impossible to write anything that isn't bloated, so ditch that thing. If you are good with PHP and your site is reasonably simple that should work fine. So would Python, Perl, simple Java servlets, etc. Static publishing (from a database) is a great idea if you can get away with it.

Ditch Solaris and go with Linux or FreeBSD on Intel hardware. Amazon and AOL did it and saved buckets of money, so you should feel confident that you can do it too.