Re: eRserver

On Dec 1, 2003, at 2:34 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:

> renneyt(at)yahoo(dot)com (Renney Thomas) writes:
>> I would like to hear about any issues related to erserver. I was a
>> little concerned about its use of Java. Java is a great tool for
>> creating application frameworks for the payroll department, but using
>> it for back-end system-level application programming is a bit
>> unnerving. Java is generally slow, memory and CPU intensive and
>> doesn't provide for tight integration like C/C++ applications.
>
> There are things about Java that cause me concern, but I would dispute
> this being the total story.
>
> The thing about database-based applications is that they wind up
> hitting the _database_ pretty hard. And when the bulk of the work is
> database queries, where it's _PostgreSQL_ doing the work, it's not
> Java that is likely to be the bottleneck.
>
> Replication is certainly no exception to this. The bulk of
> replication work takes place in the database. In extreme cases, there
> _may_ be Java-based bottlenecks to be found, but that doesn't seem to
> be the typical case.
>

There are some design problems in the erserver code that do cause some
bottlenecks -
see Andrew Sullivan's description of show-stoppers from a month or two
ago. This is more
of a design issue than a java-centric issue, however.

> In addition, I think you're looking at Java as how it was 4 years ago.
> Sun has relearned some of the things about garbage collection learned
> 15 years earlier in the Lisp community. They have built larger sets
> of compiled-to-machine-language libraries akin to LIBC, so that
> increasing portions of "system calls" are run as plenty fast compiled
> code. And JIT means that raw Java isn't as slow as it used to be.

By no means. I find it amusing the number of people who, because java
didn't
live up to their interpretation of the original hype (nothing could,
really), don't realize
how popular and entrenched it is in certain areas. No, there aren't
web-enabled word processors and
whatnot everywhere like Sun tried to make everyone believe, but its
huge in the
server/DB/web delivery world.

There are tradeoffs, of course. But such is the story of life.

As for java being a "great tool for creating application frameworks for
the payroll department", well,
my version of an "application framework for a payroll department"
manages about $90 billion in assets,
so it must be a little bit up to the task :).

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> Christopher Browne
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(740) 587-0114
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