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DaGuy · Dec 15, 2003, 07:11 PM

I thought I read somewhere that some of you managed to get Weblogic version something to run on MacOSX. Could you please share the details?

I know that it's probably a nonstandard install with limited capabilities. Still, I would like to see what the deal is.

Thanks,

Brass · Dec 15, 2003, 08:00 PM

But why would you want to. I'm not being fecetious (sp?), but am genuinely curious as to why anyone would choose weblogic over any other web application server.

Especially on a non-windows system.

It's a complete dog of a system on our Solaris machines here. Instead of forking processes (as most web servers do), it just runs everything in the one process and hogs the CPU, grinding to a halt when activity gets high. Their solution? Use multiple CPUs AND a $10,000 hardware load balancer.

... to do what any other web server does by forking and more efficient use of a single processor.

(We're only using it, because it is an essential and bundled part of a multi-million dollar application we're using... I still can't figure out why the developers chose it!)

DaGuy · Dec 15, 2003, 08:54 PM

I understand your point and also agree with it.
It just so happens, that there're some Weblogic jobs out there that I can try fetching. I've used it before (version 5 & 6) and just though about brushing up or picking up a few new tricks. Not sure what to download that actually works on OSX.

Arkham_c · Dec 15, 2003, 11:01 PM

It runs fine on OSX if you can get it installed. It's pure java, with some native IO libraries on platforms that support it. I've run 6.1SP3 on 10.2 in the past. I have not tried running a current version (8.1) on OSX but I suspect you could install on Linux or Solaris, tar it up and it would run on OSX.

As to WHY, simple. (a) WebLogic scales. It can be clustered, can run on multiple CPUs on multiple hosts. (b) It supports all the latest standards including WebServices and comes with some very good support if you pay for it. (c) It is an industry standard, so there are jobs for people who know WebLogic like I do (d) companies standardize on it, so if you want to work on a Mac for work projects, you have to support it.

WebLogic is not a bad container if you need J2EE support and you know how to configure it. The learning curve is a bit steep though.

Brass · Dec 16, 2003, 04:08 PM

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
(a) WebLogic scales. It can be clustered, can run on multiple CPUs on multiple hosts.

The whole problem with WebLogic is that it does not scale in a reasonable way. It requires FAR more hardware to get the same performance as any other similar system. Yes, it scales, but I'd rather have a system that can do the same job on a single machine, than one that requires a cluster to get the same job done. I'm dismally dissappointed by the multi-million dollar WebLogic based application we've got installed here. It's ridiculously pathetic in terms of scalability (ie, yes it will scale, but requires HUGE sums of money to do so, and other applications could do the same thing for free + the cost of one machine).

Arkham_c · Dec 16, 2003, 05:01 PM

Originally posted by Brass:
The whole problem with WebLogic is that it does not scale in a reasonable way. It requires FAR more hardware to get the same performance as any other similar system.

I gotta disagree here. WebLogic scales as well as any other J2EE server does. We have WebLogic apps serving over 23 million customers running on two Sun boxes. I wrote and maintain another WebLogic app that processes over $900,000/day and maintains an inventory of over 300 million PINs (it's a prepaid cell phone card system).

If your app is slow and scales poorly, perhaps it's just poorly written.

Brass · 06:08 PM

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
I gotta disagree here. WebLogic scales as well as any other J2EE server does. We have WebLogic apps serving over 23 million customers running on two Sun boxes. I wrote and maintain another WebLogic app that processes over $900,000/day and maintains an inventory of over 300 million PINs (it's a prepaid cell phone card system).

If your app is slow and scales poorly, perhaps it's just poorly written.

There's no doubt the the application we're using is exceedingly poorly written (I can't believe we're spending so much money on it, let alone the hardware to support it). BUT WebLogic must take some of the blame to. It's architecture in fundamentally flawed, in my opinion.

We have a 4 processor machine on which we want to run this application, however, WebLogic will only use one of them, and will absolutely hog that processor, when it's busy. It does NOT fork additional processes, but runs in a single process attempting to do all things to all clients in the one process.

Most sensible server applications (eg, sendmail, apache, etc, etc, etc), have one (or more) processes which do nothing but listen for client requests, and when they receive a request, they fork off a new process to handle that client request.

This is very efficient and makes very good use of whatevoer processors are available to the processes.

With WebLogic, instead of forking additional processes, we have to manually run multiple instances of the entire WebLogic application, assign them to processors, and buy a $10,000 load balancer to be able to use the multiple intances. What a waste of resources!

23,000,000 customers is nothing to a web server. It shouldn't require two sun boxes to service 23,000,000 customers per day! (or do you mean 23,000,000 per minute? you didn't specify). I know that WebLogic is more than just a web server, but that really shouldn't matter.

I've just checked the analog stats on one of the web servers I maintain here and it serves just over 122,000,000 customers. And it is a singe Sun machine on which the idle rate rarely drops below 50%, and the load average rarely tops 1.0. (Actually, this is the predecessor to the one which will be replaced with WebLogic and Oracle, using 3 Sun machines and 1 cisco machine - hmmm... 4 new machines to replace 1 old one - not good progress).

Sorry, I seem to have hijacked this thread, accidentally

I hope the original poster gets the information needed.

Can you tell I've got an axe to grind?

Arkham_c · Dec 16, 2003, 08:20 PM

Originally posted by Brass:
BUT WebLogic must take some of the blame to. It's architecture in fundamentally flawed, in my opinion.

We have a 4 processor machine on which we want to run this application, however, WebLogic will only use one of them, and will absolutely hog that processor, when it's busy. It does NOT fork additional processes, but runs in a single process attempting to do all things to all clients in the one process.

As to WebLogic's architecture, it's largely standardized by conforming to the J2EE standard. Since it's purely a java application, it's really limited only by java (generally, 8 processors per JVM instance). A well-written application (J2EE, EJB, CMP or BMP) will automatically use different threads for each request, and for each bean, and for each JMS queue, and for each JDBC connection pool connection. It sounds to me like you need a WebLogic expert to configure your WebLogic server -- there's no reason at all why it shouldn't be able to scale across 4 processors.

Brass · Dec 16, 2003, 10:17 PM

hmmm... that's very interesting. I wonder what the applications' developers would say if I told them that.

Do you have any short specific documentation to support that? I'd love to be able to tell these guys where to go. currently their only solution to performance problems is "buy more hardware", whereas it's clearly a problem with poor software.

However, I still stand by my assertion that 2 machines to support 23 million users should not be neccessary, when I'm supporting 122 million on one machine.

Arkham_c · Dec 17, 2003, 08:03 PM

Originally posted by Brass:
However, I still stand by my assertion that 2 machines to support 23 million users should not be neccessary, when I'm supporting 122 million on one machine.

It's all about transaction volume. How many concurrent users are you talking about? How many transactions (and database transactions) per second? We're doing well over $1,000,000 a day in volume at $5 to $20 a pop, and generally 4 database queries per financial transaction (2 selects, 1 insert, 1 delete, all within a JDBC transaction).

DaGuy · Jan 7, 2004, 02:35 AM

Here we go!

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4091

Kristoff · Jan 7, 2004, 10:31 PM

ALL YOUR JBOSS ARE BELONG TO US!

Arkham_c · Jan 8, 2004, 10:13 AM

Originally posted by Kristoff:
ALL YOUR JBOSS ARE BELONG TO US!

Until you actually try to buy WebLogic. It's pretty damn expensive. My company spent $10M on licenses from BEA.

jameshays · Jan 14, 2004, 01:46 PM

It supports all the latest standards including WebServices and comes with some very good support if you pay for it.

It doesn't support mbeans and it's JNDI support sucks...

DaGuy · Jan 15, 2004, 12:18 AM

I could be alone on this one, but I tried JBoss, Weblogic5,6&8, Tomcat+OpenEJB and JRun4.

By far the best bang for the buck (not talking performance under high loads, I don't encounter that) came from JRun4. Not one glitch and easy as hell to configure. I just didn't expect ease of use out of any app server but this product actually allows me focus on the EJBs as opposed to baby sitting the freaking app server. I really think JRun4 is under rated.

My interest in WL is simply because it's the market leader and I can mess with it on OSX! But if I had to go with something right now, I would pick JRun4 hands down.

Arkham_c · Jan 15, 2004, 09:57 AM

Originally posted by DaGuy:

My interest in WL is simply because it's the market leader and I can mess with it on OSX! But if I had to go with something right now, I would pick JRun4 hands down.

It's really about what your goals are. If you're goal is just to get a really fast J2EE server up and running quickly, Resin is the way to go. If you're looking for a free solution, JBoss is probably the best option now. JRun is a low to medium-end container. It's got a pretty nice configuration, and seems to work well.

But if you need to cluster an application across a dozen managed servers, store some beans on some servers and some on others (accessed through remote home interfaces), push software to all nodes in a cluster from a central admin server, etc., then you might run into some limitations with tools besides WebLogic or WebSphere.

There is plenty of room in the J2EE marketplace for multiple containers. There's not a one-size-fits-all solution right now.