«

Hi!

What's the best OS for running java applications?

Dan

"David Zimmerman" <> wrote in message
news:bpp%a.718$. ..
>
>
> Dan Peder Eriksen wrote:
>
> > Hi!
> >
> > What's the best OS for running java applications?
> >
> If you must have an IDE and the IDE you must have only runs on a
> particular OS, the question is moot.
Of course, but most java applications are OS independent.

>More generally, if the tools you must use (for whatever reason, job
>requirement, libraries, etc) are only available on a particlar OS, the
>question is moot,
Of course, but most java tools are OS independent.

>otherise use the OS in which you're most comfortable.

What OS runs java with best performance?

Dan Peder Eriksen wrote:

> "David Zimmerman" <> wrote in message
> news:bpp%a.718$. ..
>
>>
>>Dan Peder Eriksen wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hi!
>>>
>>>What's the best OS for running java applications?
>>>
>>
....
>
>>otherise use the OS in which you're most comfortable.
>
>
> What OS runs java with best performance?
>
>

The performance of the programmer is by far the most important part of
nay programming environment. If you decide that, say, Linux has the
best java perfoemance, but you don't know how to use LInux, your
performance will be very poor, so that the net performance of Linux as a
development platform (including you, the programmer) will be poor.

Pick the place you are most comfortable. The differences after that are
minor and will be drowned by the differences in your performance.

I, for example, am most comfortable in Unix, but curently there are some
tools we use that aren't available there, so I must work on WIndows. I
compensate to some extent by using Cygwin which helps.

On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 13:15:19 +0200, "Dan Peder Eriksen"
<> wrote or quoted :

>What's the best OS for running java applications?

Presumably one of the Sun OSes. They want to sell servers by offering
Java as bait.

--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.

Dan Peder Eriksen wrote:

> What's the best OS for running java applications?

It really depends on what kind of applications you intend to run, and
on what hardware. Even once you've chosen a hardware architecture (say,
Intel-based), the answer may depend on how many CPUs you intend to have
running.

If you're running lots of GUI-based applications, you may want to look
for a platform that hase sufficient graphical optimization routines to
make the GUI as quick as possible. If, however, you're running
applications that aren't GUI-bound (ie: they may have a GUI, but the
program execution bounds aren't dependant (or are minimally so) on the
GUI because it doesn't do a whole lot and doesn't use many components),
you may be able to get away with something else.

Another consideration is wether or not you're running multithreaded
applications. If the Java applications you're running are heavily
multithreaded, you'll want to use on OS that has excellent thread
scheduling capabilities.

Bus I/O (disk, network, et al.) may be another consideration if you're
running (an) application(s) that does a lot of I/O.

Cost may also be important to you.

My preferred OS that generally does best when you take all of these
into account is IBM's OS/2, running IBM's JRE. Its performance and
thread handling are amongst the best available. For GUI performance,
the Windows tends to have an edge, but its thread and process scheduling
is often (relatively) poor.

For cost and security, little beats out Linux.

HTH!

Brad BARCLAY

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From the OS/2 WARP v4.5 Desktop of Brad BARCLAY.
The jSyncManager Project: http://www.jsyncmanager.org

Brad BARCLAY wrote:
>
> For cost and security, little beats out Linux.
>

That's usually where BSD is the prefered choice

Last time we met, rkm <> had said:


> I've been building Java apps for about 3 years now, and I
> and about 90 other programmers where I work are all
> deploying our apps under Solaris. I have yet to hear anyone
> say the Sun JVM is buggy. I certainly haven't run into any
> of that alleged buggy behavior writing my server-side code,
> and, in fact, can go so far as to say everytime my program
> was acting strangely, I was able to trace it to the code I
> or someone near me wrote.

There was that famous memo that was leaked recently in which
a Solaris team member highlighted number of important bugs in the
Solaris JVM which had been closed with a "will not fix" message
and the general bad performance of Java on Solaris.

I haven't encountered a ton of bugs on Solaris, but, ime,
the Solaris JVM and JDK are flakier than on Windows or Linux.
I've never had Java code actually get javac to crash on
windows or linux and it's happened to me a few times on
Solaris. And, ime, most Java server apps take up a lot
more RAM when run on Solaris.


I don't know if it's true, but the memo suggested that
the JVM group has never made Solaris a priority (which
would make sense as it's the one platform on which they
have no competition as theirs is the only major JVM
which supports it. Whenever JVM comparisons are done,
it's always on Windows or Linux).



dv

--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the
center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South
Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South
End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End.

Drew Volpe, mylastname at hcs o harvard o edu

Drew Volpe wrote:

> Of course a large, expensive Sun box will outperform a
> workstation, but did you try a server running linux with
> a good storage solution ?

No, because I have 2 large, expensive Sun boxes to develop
on, and 3 Sun E10k boxes to deploy on (8 domains each, maxed
out). So why screw around with a bunch of little linux
servers, this other stuff's already bought and paid for, and
works great. But I do know a group who tried building their
enterprise class app to run distributed across about 20 PC
class boxes and it ran into so many problems, mostly with
network socket exhaustion and PC lockups that the project
was scrapped, and most of them lost their jobs, one even
died (probably not job related but ya never know.) I'm not
saying if the OS was Windows or linux, because I don't
remember, but trying to cluster all those boxes to work
together, and I'm using "cluster" loosely, turned out to be
mostly pain and very little gain.

Rick

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 17:00:41 -0600, rkm <> wrote or
quoted :

> So why screw around with a bunch of little linux
>servers, this other stuff's already bought and paid for,

Granted this is off topic, but what is it that Sun servers do that
gives them higher performance I/O?

I'd think even Linux boxes could have smart SCSI channels that deliver
bytes without cpu attention.

Surely even Linux would do elevator seeking and have multiple i/os
outstanding.

--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.

Roedy Green wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 17:00:41 -0600, rkm <> wrote or
> quoted :
>
>
>> So why screw around with a bunch of little linux
>>servers, this other stuff's already bought and paid for,
>
>
> Granted this is off topic, but what is it that Sun servers do that
> gives them higher performance I/O?
>
> I'd think even Linux boxes could have smart SCSI channels that deliver
> bytes without cpu attention.
>
> Surely even Linux would do elevator seeking and have multiple i/os
> outstanding.

Two words: "fibre channel". Ever take a look at the guts of a Sun
Enterprise Server 5000/6000 series? Awesome!
While you can do a lot with Linux boxes (and IBM is doing some
absolutely fantastic stuff with Linux on the zSeries), most of
the x86-based hardware can't come anywhere close to the band-
width available to "mainframe-class" machines.
That's not a condemnation, merely an opinion based on practical
experience.
Let's face it: even a 2.4GHz server might have problems keeping
up with an IBM 3800 printer.