RE: [WEB400] Re: WebSphere express minimum requirements

["David Morris" <David.Morris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe,

It is always a balancing act. If you can get away with a single
machine, you total cost of ownership is usually much lower. At some
point you may need to add processors and memory, which on the iSeries
can be expensive and may justify the expense of a distributed
architecture but it is worth considering.

My experience in testing and tuning Tomcat is that it runs just as fast
and scales just as well as WebSphere on a single system. Just recently,
we were told that Hyperion running on Tomcat with our hardware
configuration would only scale to about 20 users but on WebLogic, JRun,
or WebSphere it would be 50+ and testing on our system came up with
similar results. By simply following the tuning guidelines found on
Sun's Web site I was able to get it to work fine up to 60 users with
very consistent response times. I did even better with jRockit but it
would have voided the support agreement with Hyperion. The difference
was that the other products changed Java startup options in their
startup scripts where Tomcat supplies a general purpose script. 

David Morris

...Pros and cons?  Option 1 is free, but Tomcat doesn't scale as well
as
WebSphere especially on the iSeries and if you start with an
underpowered machine, ANY web server is going to perform poorly.  The
second option is a little pricey, with a separate box (<$1000) and
WebSphere ($2500), but it has the advantage of IBM support.  The third
option is a middle ground solution, costing only the price of the box
(a
Unix machine can be built for well under $1000) but with no IBM
support...

Joe