Re: Microsoft .NET frontending IBM i

Den 13/10/10 00.30, Nathan Andelin skrev:

that your system does NOT scale well. I would suggest that IBM i CGI scales
better than JEE, PHP, and MS .Net because:

You can configure the IBM i HTTP Server for *NOMAX threads, the threads are
light weight, and client connections can remain alive. CGI programs may be
loaded into HTTP server worker jobs once, then remain active, or not, depending
on the selected activation group option for each. You can configure IBM i CGI
worker jobs to a defined maximum limit. You can configure and run multiple

I have no doubt that the resources on the IBM i can be very efficiently used even at a very high load, but I think we are using scalability different.

To me a truly scalable system is linear, i.e. can handle double the load at double the price or lower, regardless of what the initial load is. (i.e. you can double ten times and this rule still holds at the final double).

Single-box systems simply cannot scale like that indefinitely. At some point you reach the point where you simply cannot make the box any larger even given enough money, and at THAT point you _must_ make it a two-machine system to handle additional load. This is not a good situation, this is where you must find out if you can separate the work load on two independent systems or you must jump through hoops to make the two systems behave like a single system data-wise. Then when the load doubles you must do it again... and again. I know IBM has some clustering solutions, but can we agree that the price may more than double at this point in time?

JEE was designed from the start to be able to work reasonably well in a multi-machine scenario. This means that - like Java programs in general - the small cases don't work well because there is too much to do, but for larger cases it is the only way because you don't have infinite cpu on a single machine.