Quoting David Dyer-Bennet (dd-b at dd-b.net): > What's servlet performance like? As you say, not relative to C; how > about relative to Perl, or PHP? Or Cold Fusion? Comparing the two on > the same platform of course. For heavily hit sites servlets out perform perl. Especially when it comes to memory and cpu usage. Because all of the servlet containers I have used, load just 1 copy of the servlet and it's run as a multi-threaded application. On a lightly used site, servlets are memory hogs and perl might be better choice. Here are some real world (production server) numbers of a site we are in the progress of moving from perl to servlets. Using tomcat 3.2 and Sun's JDK 1.3.0_32. The JVM takes 36.6Mb of core that is with all servlets loaded and started at run time. This site is heavily dynamic and typically takes 1 million servlet requests a month. Using perl-5.00503, on RedHat 6.2, each perl request needed to fork/exec the perl interpreter, which takes 8Mb of core. If you get 5 simultaneous requests, you are already over the core size of ALL the servlets. Remember this is just one cgi and the site has hundreds. There where many times when the box would thrash the drives because of all the perl interpreters chewing up core. Yes, mod_perl can help here, but servlets still scale better. Because all(?) of the servlet containers allow you to specific the VM's memory usage and stack size you can actually keep resource utilization in check. I do not have any comparsion data on php, but I think it scales, look at sourceforge. Cold fusion is mostly windows based, so I have not touched it. -- Bob Tanner <tanner at real-time.com> | Phone : (952)943-8700 http://www.mn-linux.org | Fax : (952)943-8500 Key fingerprint = 6C E9 51 4F D5 3E 4C 66 62 A9 10 E5 35 85 39 D9