Re: eRserver

renneyt(at)yahoo(dot)com (Renney Thomas) writes:
> I would like to hear about any issues related to erserver. I was a
> little concerned about its use of Java. Java is a great tool for
> creating application frameworks for the payroll department, but using
> it for back-end system-level application programming is a bit
> unnerving. Java is generally slow, memory and CPU intensive and
> doesn't provide for tight integration like C/C++ applications.

There are things about Java that cause me concern, but I would dispute
this being the total story.

The thing about database-based applications is that they wind up
hitting the _database_ pretty hard. And when the bulk of the work is
database queries, where it's _PostgreSQL_ doing the work, it's not
Java that is likely to be the bottleneck.

Replication is certainly no exception to this. The bulk of
replication work takes place in the database. In extreme cases, there
_may_ be Java-based bottlenecks to be found, but that doesn't seem to
be the typical case.

In addition, I think you're looking at Java as how it was 4 years ago.
Sun has relearned some of the things about garbage collection learned
15 years earlier in the Lisp community. They have built larger sets
of compiled-to-machine-language libraries akin to LIBC, so that
increasing portions of "system calls" are run as plenty fast compiled
code. And JIT means that raw Java isn't as slow as it used to be.
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Christopher Browne
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