Re: What About Price vs. Performance?

["Joe Pluta " <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't think so, Nathan, but only time will tell.  Since the majority of my 
overhead is in the Java code formatting the HTML, not in the actual data access 
(it's on the order of 10-1 in CPU seconds used), I think that offloading the 
Java code to multiple front end servers WILL increase throughput.

But I won't know that until I build a little test system to see.  And you're 
right, as you build a network on the front end, you wander dangerously into the 
TCO waters.  But since the network has no database requirements and is pretty 
much just doing servlets, I'm less concerned about it.  There are people who've 
been doing clustered web servers for some time, and they're pretty good at it.

Joe

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: "Nathan M. Andelin" <nathanma@haaga.com>
Reply-To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 10:54:18 -0600

>Maybe you can pull that off Joe, but in my experience, the overhead and
bottlenecks associated with inter-system communications will severely limit
the gains you might hope to gain from a second CPU.  Then factor in the TCO
argument, and you're at a net loss.

I'm not familiar enough with the Java ProgramCall API you're using, but it
sounds very similar to how ODBC dynamically invokes OS/400 "host servers" to
access OS/400 resources.  If this is the case, you might front-end your
application on a Linux box and experience no performance improvement.

Nathan.

------------ Original ------------------
You see, by completely splitting the HTML generation from the business
application, I've created a true n-tier design.  I can put as many $1000 web
application servers on the front line as I want, all accessing the AS/400
for data.  The code doesn't change, because the Java Toolbox that I use for
communication is 100% Java, and will run on any Java-enabled platform.  On
top of that, I'm looking into using JDBC procedure calls, which will make
even the toolbox unnecessary.

So if I have UI problems, I simply add another $1000 box and get another 100
users.  There's no relational database requirements on those boxes, so they
absolutely fly.  The AS/400 is limited solely by its database processing
capabilities, not its UI requirements.

 You can't do that with green screens or with RPG-CGI.
------------ Original ------------------



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