Benchmarking writeups seem to attract controversy; let's see how Scott's latest fares... First, a micro-recap: in March, Filip posted a note on NIO scaling up to 16,000 clients; some people read the note as a head-to-head comparison (Tomcat, Jetty, GlassFish) which generated a fair amount of interest [1].

One the key issues when measuring performance is what bechmarking tools you are using. Scott is the GlassFish performance lead and he has an opinion on this... In two recent writeups, he advocated for Faban instead of AB and then showed a Simple use of Faban. In today's blog Scott uses Faban's new Common Driver to test Tomcat and GlassFish against, again, 16,000 users.

GlassFish looks pretty good but you will have to go read his blog to see the details... including his ending remarks:

So does this any of this mean that glassfish is better than tomcat? For some applications, probably. For others, probably not. The real point to take away from this is an understanding of how important it is to understand what you're measuring when you measure performance.... <SNIP> the only realistic benchmark is your own application