users@glassfish.java.net

Re: Websphere vs Glassfish

From: Shreedhar Ganapathy <shreedhar.ganapathy_at_oracle.com>
Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2011 08:42:20 -0700

Hi Radim
First off, we very much appreciate your candid feedback. Some responses
below :

On 10/14/11 11:36 PM, Radim Kolar wrote:
> Dne 13.10.2011 18:30, Leonardo napsal(a):
>>
>> I disagree about stability, only old releases with great fixpacks
>> lists (therefore forget JEE6 for the moment) can say that.
>>
> Of course, usually people are using websphere - 2 major versions in
> production. websphere is amazing piece of software.
>
> In every glassfish version, i have stability problems. V2 was uber
> junk with big memory leaks, V3 is better but it is still easy to kill
> it with denial of service attack.

It is always great to have feedback from community users who have
experienced many application servers and share their insights. So your
time taken to share feedback is very much appreciated.

Have you filed issues in the GlassFish community JIRA
(http://java.net/jira/browse/GLASSFISH) so issues you see with GlassFish
can be fixed ? This will make your feedback more actionable for us to
work on.

You've mentioned v2 and v3 - could you be specific about the versions
you have used? The last shipped version for v2 was v2.1.1 and the latest
release of GlassFish on v3 was 3.1.1 - in the community roadmap we have
shared plans for a 3.1.2 release in future - so it would be great to
have your issues on 3.1.1 filed on JIRA so developers can look into it.

More below

> Same app on websphere survives everything.
>
> Open source app servers:
>
> Jboss - avoid if possible for new projects, really bad web console,
> not compatible. Use only if you are jboss shop. Not very stable, often
> memory leaks , great documentation and community. Sometimes do not
> even works out-of-box after install.
>
> geronimo - really good stability, but classloading suck so much, you
> need several days to get app running, i was not able to run some WARs
> due to stupid classloading at all. Console has really good monitoring
> and debugging tools. Bad documentation. NO UPDATE even between minor
> versions, reinstall entire app server is must. Included active mq
> broker is really very unstable but kinda fast. Its number 1 cause of
> server crashes.
>
> glassfish - server monitoring sucks,

What would you like to see ? Could you share some insights into what
would constitute good monitoring capability in your view and file
enhancement requests in JIRA?

> but GUI for cluster management is great help, almost all WARs runs out
> of box. update tool is really nice stuff, performance is better then
> geronimo, stability is not very good, scheduled restarts are required
> for improving server health.

It would greatly help to know specifics of the issues you are seeing -
are restarts required because of heap exhaustion, high CPU utilization,
perm gen issues, deadlocks ? There numerous ways in which differently
written application code paths can cause application server behavior to
be different from what we have tested in our quality tests. Hence, it is
very important to know your specific issues with appropriate logs,
thread dumps, jmaps and such other output to address stability issues.

> so-so documentation,

What do you see lacking? I request you to please give us specifics.

> almost no community outside Sun fanclub.

Your participation in our community itself is a great testament to our
growing community outreach - we welcome constructive criticism as much
as appreciation for the GlassFish community contributions. You are part
of our community and your contributions in the form of bugs, feedback
and even code would help the overall GlassFish community become an
enriched place. We highly encourage your active participation in
contributing on the above lines.

> some things are really difficult to find, people needs to blog about
> this more often.

Again, I would very much appreciate specifics so we can address these.

> Easier administration then jboss or geronimo. Usually people needs 1
> day to setup app in geronimo (if they don't have experience with that
> app in G) and 1/2 hour in glassfish including glassfish installation.
> Best option for J2EE starters. NO FREEBSD SUPPORT for update tool.
>
> OpenMQ is broker is so-so. Performance is 30-50% worse then activemq
> but stability is better. Problem is that queue size is openmq is
> limited by server memory, no swap to disk.

This is good feedback - we can have someone from our MQ team respond on
this.

Thank you very much for sharing your feedback with us. We look forward
to your continued active participation in improving the GlassFish
experience for users like you and many others in our community.
Additionally, for your production needs, I'd also suggest considering
buying support for your GlassFish and MQ deployment.

Best regards

Shreedhar


> We currently use it but only because other OSS JMS brokers sucks even
> more. It tends to hang for long time if messages are not consumed for
> a while. Sadly all opensource JMS brokers are kind crap, i am not
> talking about performance but about stability. For message broker
> stability is #1.