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Comment by guiomie | Hacker News Reader

"I can tell that this system consists of a JBoss Application Server with data access components and RESTful web services developed using Java. Given my prior experience with JBoss and Java, although they are great for middleware development, they’re known to be a bit slow."

I always had this non founded impression that something running on the JVM would be slow ... this author also. Anyone with data to back this impression ?

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It has nothing to do with "running on the JVM". The JVM is about as fast as you'll get any VM offering GC and running an IR like Java bytecode. It's only slow compared to compiled, native code (and even then nowhere near as relatively slow as it used to be), which no competing tech stack would be doing. It's much faster than Ruby, Python, etc.

That said, my experiences with JBoss haven't left me enamoured of it, and it certainly wouldn't be my first choice.

In techempower's web framework benchmarks[1], Java-base frameworks top most categories. One C++-based framework, CPoll, gets a few percentage points more in a few tests, but Java servlets are the highest performing across all tests. (As always with micro-benchmarks, take all this with a grain of salt, but at least it's some data.)

1 - http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

There are a ton of Java frameworks in the top performing benchmarks (See Lng:Jav). Whatever conclusion you've made from Java Swing applications running on top of WindowsXP machines in the early 00's are not applicable to modern web server performance.

"Anyone with data to back this impression ?"

No. Because it's not the AS that is slow. Someone else's code that is not efficient enough or doing too much DB calls.

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