IRirahul·May 22, 2012
> ... and when we look at the um... "old" fart Java... their roster is even more impressive: LinkedIN, Google, NetFlix, Amazon.
Sure it is. But I won't use Java for web stuff. I might use it for some background services, but for regular CRUD functionality, Java buys me nothing. I generally use Python(Flask)/Jinja2/Flask-SqlAlchemy. Flask is intuitive; Jinja2 is pleasant and fast; Flask-SQLAlchemy is concise with the option of exploring the raw power of SQLAlchemy. For regular use cases, nothing in Java beats this combination. I have looked at Play; it comes closer but it's still not there.
Checkout this toy benchmark that was doing the rounds 2 months ago https://github.com/grahamking/Key-Value-Polyglot The naive python solution https://github.com/grahamking/Key-Value-Polyglot/blob/master... performs dog slow. Java has real threads, JIT;
Read the rest
but guess what, the naive Java solution still is dog slow https://github.com/grahamking/Key-Value-Polyglot/blob/master...
My specialized python solutions are magnitudes of times faster than both naive Python and Java solutions:
https://github.com/rahulkmr/Key-Value-Polyglot/blob/master/m...
https://github.com/rahulkmr/Key-Value-Polyglot/blob/master/m...
The naive solutions were taking around 20 seconds to do 500 writes followed by 500 reads. My changed solution does 5000 writes followed by 5000 reads in under 2 seconds. The 500 and 5000 aren't typos - the naive solutions was taking about 20 seconds for 1000 operations, whereas tailored solution was doing 10000 operations under 2 seconds.
This is the discussion thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3733090
I get it that this is an IO bound problem, and naturally an epoll based solution will totally smoke a thread-per-request solution, but that's the point I am trying to make. If at the end of the day, intuitive solutions don't work and I have to do custom implementations, I am not getting much out of using Java. I might use it for something which is CPU bound about 70% of the time, but anything other than that, the pains far outweigh benefits.