There was some discussion on the Vufind about moving from Tomcat to Jetty. I first wanted to see if it was possible to run this so I got the latest nightly build from Solr to see which packages were needed to run the server. I then grabbed the latest Jetty (6.1.5) since the version in Solr’s build was 6.1.3. I packaged the same files that were in Solr’s distribution and dropped Vufind’s schema and config file into Jetty and fired it up. Voila…it worked like a champ.
The thing I really wanted to know is if this Jetty version would perform in a similar fashion to Tomcat. What I did to test was set up two visualized servers on the same box. Each were set up with the exact same hardware (2GB RAM, 1 processor, bridged 1GB network, running Ubuntu 7.04 server). I also used the same Java tuning on both machines (“-server -Xmx1024m -Xms1024 -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:+AggressiveOpts“). The only difference between the two was that one ran Tomcat and the other Jetty.
For the test, I indexed our library’s 1.8+ million catalog records on both machines which both chewed through the records in about 9 hours. To do the actual testing, I used JMeter to query both systems at the same time using a few scenarios that I thought might possibly be “real.”
In the first test, I sent 10 users with 100 queries for the book title “Flashman” to see what happened. I was pretty impressed with the results:
| Server | Samples | Average | Median | Min | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jetty | 1000 | 4ms | 4ms | 1ms | 17ms |
| Tomcat | 1000 | 3ms | 4ms | 0ms | 28ms |
You know, we might get a few more users than just 10 at a time, so I ramped it up to 100 users doing 10 queries. Again, there wasn’t much of a difference.
| Server | Samples | Average | Median | Min | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jetty | 1000 | 12ms | 8ms | 1ms | 565ms |
| Tomcat | 1000 | 9ms | 7ms | 1ms | 530ms |
Now to really ramp things up with 100 users doing 100 queries
| Server | Samples | Average | Median | Min | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jetty | 100000 | 9ms | 6ms | 1ms | 2349ms |
| Tomcat | 100000 | 9ms | 6ms | 1ms | 1844ms |
And, just for kicks, 1000 users with 10 queries
| Server | Samples | Average | Median | Min | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jetty | 10000 | 32ms | 6ms | 0ms | 5643ms |
| Tomcat | 10000 | 26ms | 5ms | 0ms | 4295ms |
With median results within a millisecond of each other, Andrew went ahead and swapped out Tomcat in favor for Jetty for its smaller footprint. I have to say that any time I’ve needed to do anything with JSP, I’ve opted to go with Tomcat. More because I know the name, but I think I’m going to keep Jetty on my list from now on! I want to take a closer look at their ANT and Eclipse Plugins!
