A slight worry in the back of my mind was that close tie between JSP and the server platform it is run under. In order to gain further information I spent today installing and running tests against GlassFish to compare with Tomcat.
The findings of this exercise were very simple: Tomcat is faster. This is as I suspected all along since Tomcat is purely a JSP capable shell wheras GlassFish is a complete enterprise capable application server.
Another useful thing I found out today is that PHP no longer supports ISAPI. Since people seemed of mixed opinion as to whether FastCGI or ISAPI should be used this a useful bit of information. Whether it is better or not FastCGI is the only supported technology that will work at speed.
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Not disputing your conclusions but I’d love to see the kind of tests you’ve ran.
Hi Alexis. Only tested Glassfish vs Tomcat briefly since it was a side point to my project. Ran two simple JSP pages – one uses a MySQL database, the other doesn’t.
I tested with 1 to 8 clients where each client roughly equates to one simultaneous request. With 8 clients for one page the Tomcat version took roughly 20 seconds (for 10000 requests) and the GlassFish version took around 55 seconds.
I fully admit that I have no expertise in the area and would welcome any comment as to the cause. On the surface though the title of this post did appear to be true.
Sent it via twitter (also entered in this comments form…)