What OS platform does the Servoy team recommend for the app server? All other things being equal, what platform has the best performance? I would imagine this would largely have to do with what platform has the best Java implementation.
Has any load testing been done to benchmark the various platforms?
Currently Windows has the best Java implementation followed by Linux on Intel. Windows is the fastest on the low to mid-range servers. (if you really need speed and scalability you can also deploy on mainframes such as the IBM zSeries). We expect Apple to catch up once the G5 and a new Java version have been released. Solaris also runs Servoy Application Server very well, we run all our internal applications on a Solaris Sparc box, to achieve high speeds and scalability on Sun hardware you need to through some serious money at it though (I'm talking about thousands of simulataneous clients here).
We are in the process of writing a new speed and scalability suite that will carefully reflect real life applications, once we have test results we will publish them.
Re performance of the different java implementations, there's an interesting report at http://www.volano.com/report/
I'm not so sure that the conclusions (as distinct from the data) will necessarily stand for Servoy - they appear to be based on an assumption of many short-lived connections (as may be typical for a web server) .
Regards,
Neale.
Most of the volano testsuite is based on messaging server tests (for their chat server software). Those are keeping live connections all the time so they have to run many threads at once. It doesn't scale very well because of that.
Servoy uses a short connection protocol that only builds up a new connection when needed, that may be a bit slower (we are talking about miliseconds here) but it scales much better.
Servoy does have a live connection by default (the so-called 2way socket factory), like volano because when clients are behind firewalls or nat routers they can't talk back to the server without it. For better scaling you should disable 2 way socket factory if your clients are on the same network.
We don't do this by default because we want to support as much as possible different configurations after a default installation.