Java Vs. C#: Which Performs Better In the 'Real World'?

Nerval's Lobster writes "Software developer Jeff Cogswell writes: 'Let's compare Java and C#, two programming languages with large numbers of ardent fans and equally virulent detractors. I'm not interested in yet another test that grindingly calculates a million digits' worth of Pi. I want to know about real-world performance: How does each language measure up when asked to dish out millions of Web pages a day? How do they compare when having to grab data from a database to construct those pages dynamically? The results were quite interesting.' Having worked as a professional C# programmer for many years, Cogswell found some long-held assumptions challenged."

Comments

Language is hardly relevant

[InterBigs]

When talking about large-scale websites the language is hardly relevent. There are as many high-traffic sites running on C#, Java, PHP or whatever. When facing large scale other factors play a much larger role. The only exception is when you're talking Facebook or Twitter scale: Facebook has practically reinvented PHP and also has some parts of their code in C (or C++, not sure) and Twitter made a switch from Ruby to Scala in order to handle the onslaught of users. The results mentioned in the article (accepting 2000 requests takes 600ms longer when using simple code) are not that interesting in this context.

Re:Language is hardly relevant

[QBasicer]

This is more a comparison between runtimes and servers, and less about language.

The reason this is interesting, is it's a very simple test, and hows the maximum performance. Requests can never be faster than returning a simple string. CLR + ISS is slower than JVM + Tomcat. Unfortunately, we don't know where exactly the performance difference lies.

Re:Language is hardly relevant

[PhrostyMcByte]

C# 5.0 (the latest version) has language-integrated async functionality that makes writing vertically scalable software a snap. It looks and behaves almost exactly like sync code, but actually runs async. Talking about server-side async here, not client-side.

Doing the same thing with Java or an older version of C#, where you have only the base libraries to help you, is really quite tedious to do properly.

So, for a test like this involving web development, I'd say language is actually a pretty relevant topic. Unless you've got lots of money to spend and can throw more hardware at something, the kind of perf improvement that can be provided by this is pretty astounding.

But, there are problems with this test. He says explicitly that he's looking for a real-world test, but then goes and basically times a Hello World. There is no database access, no concurrent users. No real-world anything.

Re:Language is hardly relevant

[squiggleslash]

I've seen Tomcat on Windows a lot. Remember that most Enterprise environments until relatively recently used Windows for everything, but also bought into Java as the development platform to standardize on. Developers would be required to develop Java under Windows, and the Gods of IT would refuse to countenance a Linux server in their server room even if the developers wanted Windows.

RHEL's rise has changed things somewhat, but it's still a common combination.

Re:Language is hardly relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason this is interesting, is it's a very simple test, and hows the maximum performance. Requests can never be faster than returning a simple string. CLR + ISS is slower than JVM + Tomcat. Unfortunately, we don't know where exactly the performance difference lies.

Nope, maybe that's what author think's he's doing, but he clearly doesn't understand the stacks.

For .NET, he's using the entire ASP.NET MVC framework to return a simple string. For Java, he's just using a bare servlet, and no framework code. To make this a fair test, he should be using Spring or something on the Java side.

Re:Language is hardly relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're running Facebook or Twitter, the odds are that you don't really need to be asking questions like this. The bottlenecks you encounter are more likely to be poor code within your codebase than anything intrinsic about the language.

If you are running a site like Facebook that needs to scale beyond what that platform can realistically cope with, and your codebase is perfect and can't be made any faster, then it may be more feasible to do what Facebook did with PHP and fix the platform, rather than to switch to something different as that would involve rewriting your entire codebase, at which point you no longer have "perfect" code any more, and you lose the benefits of your dev team's existing skillset.

But very few of us are ever going to be in that position. Facebook did what the needed to do given the circumstances, but the rest of us should just concentrate on improving our own code before criticising the platform we're using.

Bottom line: If you write decent code, it doesn't matter what language it's in; all the major platforms are perfectly capable of running a high traffic web site. Conversely badly written code can and will bring even the most resiliant of servers to its knees. It's all about your code, not about the platform.

Anyone who tells you otherwise and says "language X isn't capable of doing that" is being a language snob. Feel free to ignore them.

They are both as good

[hsmith]

As your worst developer on the team.

I've used both and really haven't seen issue with either. I have a slight preference for C#, personally, but it all comes down to your design, architecture, and implementation that will slow you down.

Re:They are both as good

[ImprovOmega]

Eclipse is the emacs of the IDE world. It tries to be everything to everyone - infinite customizability, plugins, addons, tweaks you can make...it is at the point where for a new user it is really difficult to get a starting point to go from, and finding simple commands can be a PITA to find since they're in non-obvious (unless you've been using Eclipse for years) places.

NetBeans does a better job of exposing the functionality you need, though the extensibility is more limited (like vi or nano).

Does it matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally would expect one to win in some regards and the other to win in others. My concern is that C# is too tightly bound to MS platforms. Java isn't perfect, it isn't the write once run everywhere that was promised, but the port from Java on MS to Java on Linux, Mac ... will most certainly be better.

That is enough that I would prefer Java over C# on my projects. Of course there are always outside parameters that might be enough to tip the scale.

Re:Does it matter.

[hsmith]

I'll give it to MS, they have moved the language forward. Linq is amazing. Oracle has just isn't pushing forward as MS has done.

These tests were also simple

[ranton]

These tests were also just as simple as calculating Pi a thousand times. Based on the description, I was hoping for some tests where a website with a dozen or so complete views with significant bindings were created in both Java and C#. Instead it was just an HTTP request or a page that printed the date.

Different frameworks and web servers are going to use varying amounts of overhead, so simple tests really only calculate that overhead. If you are going to provide benchmarks that actually have some meaning then they need to test complex enough behavior to mimic real world usage.

These tests basically just show that Tomcat is faster than IIS for simple scenarios, or perhaps that ASP.NET MVC 4 adds more overhead to page requests than JSP does. Whether this overhead is meaningful when you are processing rich real world web pages is not covered by these tests.

Nothing to see here

[MojoRilla]

This article was obviously written by someone who has no idea what the state of the art is in performance web serving. If you know anything about high scale web technology, skip it.

Where to start complaining? Don't roll your own http server. You probably don't understand what you are doing, and you will get weird results. Using Windows as a platform for a java web server is pretty silly. The author incorrectly assumes that because the .Net framework is fast, the ASP.net framework will be. That isn't the case. Running load testing on hello world test cases is silly. If you are interested in the real world, try testing with real world applications. The author also doesn't seem to understand that the JVM or .Net runtime will compile bytecode using JiT methods (Just in Time compiling). Finally, if you have skilled developers, it doesn't really matter what language you use. Architectural issues like data storage and caching are much more important than language.

Choosing a Language

[RedHackTea]

Today, most of (if not all) the reasons for choosing a language are subjective instead of objective (not objective-c). Languages are so similar (at least the fundamentals, not talking about Brainfuck-lang here) that you pick a language based on the platform it targets or just personal feelings.

In short, the Microsoft fanboys avoid more Linux-favored languages (and don't even think about Apple languages); Apple fanboys avoid more Microsoft-favored languages; and Linux fanboys avoid more patent-encumbered, closed-source languages and ones requiring to purchase an IDE/etc. for development. All fanboys avoid what they perceive as "diseased languages" like the plague. However, they will still touch these diseased language every now and then because either they have to for a job or out of pure curiosity.

Being a Linux fanboy, C# is my bubonic plague. This is also in part growing up using Microsoft Visual Studio 6 for C++. For the haters, I actually loved this IDE, but then I found out that none of my code would work on other platforms or even other compilers with Win32 such as Borland++, g++, etc. (we all remember how a variable in a for-loop wouldn't be contained to just that block... terrible). And then when exploring other languages/environments, I couldn't believe my eyes when I could actually see library-level source code -- you have no idea how useful this is. Even though I'll admit that Microsoft has gotten a little better about this (although they still tried to spread FUD using the DroidRage campaign), it's not worth it to me. They've already lost my faith in them as a customer, and I can't see myself ever returning.

Now, a good study would be to remove all of this and determine what languages are either faster to code in, easier to debug/maintain/extend with enterprise-level code, or more readable. But would this study even be useful? The differences would be so minute. Scripting languages are going to be faster to code in, so what's the fastest scripting language to code in? Object-oriented languages will be the easiest to debug/maintain/extend. As for readability, who knows? It's so subjective. We'd have to get a large, random sample size of people that have never seen a programming language before.

Having said all of this, I still appreciate this guy doing the study. Apache has always made top-quality code, and it's good to see that TomCat lives up to it.

Finally, as for sheer speed (and needs to be at least easier than assembly), C will always win.

Re:are they serious right now?

[0123456]

Open Office is slow as hell.

Repeat after me: Open Office is not written in Java, though it uses Java for some optional features. Yon don't even need Java installed to run Open Office, and disabling Java does reduce Open Office startup time since it no longer needs to start the JVM.

But it's a good meme to keep repeating, because when someone says 'Java sucks because Open Office is slow' and they're not talking about startup time, it's a very good indication that they have no clue.