Re: Which scales better? J2EE, PHP, or CGIDEV2?

On Wed, 6 Oct 2010, Nathan Andelin wrote:

The Wikipedia definition works for me. "scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be enlarged."

Under that definition CGIDEV2 would scale well just by running under IBM i where available resources (processors, memory, etc.) are automatically allocated to separate jobs. No need to configure anything, except standard HTTP server configuration directives allowing a given number of threads and CGI server jobs, timeouts, and so forth. Native workloads automatically scale to use available resources.

There is nothing unique or special about the CGDEV2 environment described above on the IBM i vs. CGI programming on *nix. In both cases available resources and automatically allocated to separate jobs. It seems to me that a possible differentiator in performance is how well the operating system performs a context switch (changes the active process on a CPU).

I believe that I have read that CGI programming doesn't scale particularly well. If that is the case, I believe that one would find no particular advantage to doing CGI programming on the i versus anything else as I believe the i isn't doing anything particularly different than what other systems do. Then if CGI programming in general doesn't scale well, I would suppose that CGI programming on the i doesn't scale well, either. Conversely, if CGI programming scales perfectly well on other systems I would expect the same on the i.

James Rich

if you want to understand why that is, there are many good books on
the design of operating systems. please pass them along to redmond
when you're done reading them :)
- Paul Davis on ardour-dev