Re: Difference between AS/400 and any normal web server

ABSOLUTELY Agree with Brad here and DISagree with Steve.

Check out www.grar.com as one example.

This ran for YEARS on a P05 POWER7 taking MILLIONS of hits a day. Today it runs on POWER9 and takes MORE millions of hits a day. Open source PHP and SQL.

I have MANY customers using web services internally as well with excellent performance on small machines even with large databases and complicated queries.

- Larry



On 8/21/2022 6:21 PM, Brad Stone wrote:

On Sun, Aug 21, 2022 at 11:20 AM Steve Richter <stephenrichter@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Biggest difference between IBM i and a PC web server is performance. IBM i
just does not scale well. A web page will work great when you demo it to
the user. But a single core power 8 can get bogged down by web code and the
SQL that serves results sets to the web pages. When that happens, code that
worked now fails with timeout messages.

Funny, I've seen exactly the opposite. Throw a DB with over 10000 records
at a PC server and watch it TANK hard.

I did a POC over 25 years ago for the company I worked for (right after my
eRPG book came out). They were consolidating all the customer service data
from many sister companies all over the world. I used our little dev box
for the POC (running maybe V3R? Maybe early V4). It smoked the PC farm
the PC guys had set up using Cold Fusion without even breaking a sweat..
and thus the IBM i web team was put together and they purchased a dedicated
IBM i (AS400 back then) just for that job.. Still running to this day
supporting hundreds of companies around the world with millions of customer
service records being queried all the time and very very fast.

Come to think of it, it's even before XML was becoming a standard as we
developed our own data transfer layout/method that ended up being similar
to XML just to get all the data ot the single server. X.12 was out of the
question and JSON wasn't even a thought in a young open source programmer's
eyeball.

Access paths are part of the puzzle on the IBM i as well. A lot of people
think you make them by looking at SQL and seeing what you're ordering data
by when in fact it's the select WHERE portion that makes all the
difference. And of course, careful use of pagination helps a lot too.

All using HTTP APIs... this was before eRPG SDK and CGIDEV2 as well... in
fact, it helped me get the idea for eRPG SDK.