This morning, I did some comparisons between Jetty 5.1.5rc1, Tomcat 5.5.9 and Resin 3.0.14 (OS version). I ran AppFuse’s “test-canoo” target, which tests all the JSPs using Canoo WebTest. I did this as a Servlet 2.4 application, and had to tweak some stuff in my web.xml to make it work on Jetty and Resin. Nothing big, just stuff that Tomcat let pass through and these servers didn’t. One interesting thing to note that Resin requires you to use “http://java.sun.com/jstl/fmt” for JSTL’s “fmt” tag URI, while Jetty and Tomcat require “http://java.sun.com/jstl/fmt_rt”. This is with Resin’s “fast-jstl” turned off – b/c everything blows up if it’s turned on (I don’t feel like coding my JSTL to Resin’s standards, that’s why I turn it off).
Below is a list of the average time it took to run “test-canoo” after I ran it once to compile all the JSPs.
- Jetty: 19 seconds
- Tomcat: 19 seconds
- Resin: 29 seconds
In addition, I tested how long it took for each server to startup – including the initialization of AppFuse.
- Jetty: 7 seconds
- Tomcat: 8 seconds
- Resin: 13 seconds
So what does all this mean? A number of things:
- I need to clean up AppFuse’s web.xml a bit for 2.4 applications.
- Putting the database connection pool configuration in a Spring context file (vs. JNDI) makes AppFuse much more portable.
- Jetty isn’t as fast as Jetty-lovers say it is (or maybe Tomcat just caught up).
- The open source version of Resin is much slower than the other open source servlet containers.
- I should restructure the build.xml to pull out Tomcat stuff and allow users to specify server deployment settings (i.e. in a ${servername}.xml file).
- Orion still doesn’t support the Servlet 2.4 or JSP 2.0 specifications.