J2EE Performance Improvement 3X on Linux

In an interesting press release IBM announced today that Olympus America Inc., a precision company that designs and delivers solutions in healthcare and consumer electronics worldwide, has increased the performance of its Web services three times by supplementing its current environment with Linux on IBM’s “all-in-one” System i business computing solution. I am not surprised.

Olympus added some 50 Web services built on J2EE and Apache Tomcat to Red Hat Linux running on the System i. Those applications tap just one of the system’s 25 processors and one gigabyte of memory. By a three-to-one margin, the new system outperforms Olympus’s previous environment - which required two processors and two gigabytes of memory. link

The credit goes to Linux and Tomcat, not much to IBM. Even you can get such high performance environment with a days effort.

The news is not surprising to me. Long time back, in 2001, I personally tested J2EE performance on Linux x86 machines. Standard desktop computers with intel cpu and Linux OS outperformed 4 CPU Solaris workstations.

The bottomline is if you are planning to run high performance J2EE application server give Linux machines a serious thought. Also it validates my longtime faith in Tomcat. It has matured to handle enterprise class loads without Apache’s help.