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

Take a look at the Drawbacks and Alternatives section at the following URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

It would appear that we don't have some of the issues. We have a
compiled language: RPG, we have processes that, once started, stay
running for as long as the server is up. That's where IBM i OS steps
in because it has, in my opinion, a more refined approach to managing
large workloads and other systems aren't built with the same thing in
mind.

Note also the stated comment on that page concerning J2EE. They
basically say the advantage of J2EE is that instead of creating a
process (aka Job), they are able to instead create a smaller unit - a
thread. I would be curious to know how much CPU time is required to
create a new J2EE thread vs. have Apache hand-off a "CGI" request to
an existing job?

Which begs the question, are we really doing CGI programming, or do we
just call it that because it sort of feels like it?

Thoughts?
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/



On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 4:08 PM, James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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