Scott Oaks's Blog

New SPECjAppServer scores for Glassfish

From my perspective, its most important fix is to a bug that caused the SPEC organization to mark our previously submitted SPECjAppServer scores as non-compliant. This allowed us to resubmit results on this benchmark.

Accordingly, a few weeks ago we resubmitted results on the Sun Fire T2000 Cool Threads server. This is clearly a machine of choice for Java EE applications, as almost every application server vendor who has submitted results for this benchmark has done so on that hardware.

This result is also the first benchmark in the industry to use the new, just-released, Java 6 JDK, which has some pretty impressive performance results to boast about as well.

The results show that glassfish is still clearly the price-performance leader for the application server tier.

Notes on pricing data: Pricing is calculated on the acquisition cost for the application server tier hardware and software. Pricing for the application server hardware is from http://www.sun.com/. Pricing for IBM WebSphere is from http://www.cdw.com/. All pricing is list pricing as of 12/14/06.

I'd really like to include BEA's cost in the above table, but BEA doesn't have transparent pricing. http://www.awaretechnologies.com/ has a price for a single core license of BEA 8.1 Advantage Edition at $10K. At that price, BEA would come in at $60.13/JOP. But of course, the T2000 has 8 cores, and BEA list price on that machine is likely closer to $20K, leaving them at $76.37/JOP. Alas, to be truly accurate, you'll have to get your BEA rep to give you their list price, and do the math yourself: ($26917 (HW price including OS Media) + BEA list Price) / 615.64.

More disclosures: SPEC and the benchmark name SPECjAppServer 2004 are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of 12/14/06. The comparison presented is based on application servers run on the Sun Fire T2000 1.2 ghz server. For the latest SPECjAppServer 2004 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/.

Comments

• It would be interesting to compare the S/W only $/JOPS. Do you have those #'s?

  Posted by: kenpaulsen on December 15, 2006 at 06:33 PM

• Well, the appserver $/JOPS for SJSAS would be 0 in that case (0 / 521.42). The BEA price would be something like $32.48 (assuming the $20k price tag), and IBM would come in at $26.11.

  Posted by: sdo on December 18, 2006 at 07:36 AM

• Your blog references Java EE page under a title called "what's new" and there is no easy way to find out what's new in SJSAS 9.0 Update 1 Patch 1 from its earlier release.

  Posted by: ss141213 on December 18, 2006 at 07:11 PM

• Great news on the product release, but seriously, the naming is ridiculous.

  Do you really need 11 words to describe one product:

  Sun Java System Application Server 9.0 Platform Edition Release 1 Patch 1..?

  Seriously, little wonder why people have a hard time keeping up with your products. I thought this was meant to have got better after moving from iPlanet to Sun One, and then to Sun Java System.

  It's very hard to champion Sun stuff in an industry familiar with BEA, IBM and JBoss when Sun are so schizophrenic with their product names.

  Posted by: coreyjohnston on December 26, 2006 at 06:23 PM

• ss141213: It's essentially a bug fix release addressing 20 bugs from the previous release (see http://java.sun.com/javaee/sdk/javaee5sdk_relnotes.jsp for a little more information). Our release engineers are also updating the bug list at
  https://glassfish.dev.java.net/downloads/v1_ur1-p01-b02-bugs.html, though right now it's incomplete.

  corey: I completely agree that our previous naming changes from iplanet through Sun Java Systems were confusing; I'm only the engineer here :-) But I do hope that you apply the same word count standards to our competitors: the software BEA uses for its submissions is properly identified as "BEA WebLogic Server 10 Advantage Edition Service Pack 3" -- or 9 words; not really substantially different. A jBoss submission (if one existed) might be something like "JBoss Application Server 4.0.3 Service Pack 1" -- 7 words, but that doesn't actually identify the profile used for jBoss which would also need to be specified (and which corresponds to our platform edition or BEA's Advantage Edition).

  Posted by: sdo on January 02, 2007 at 11:17 AM

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