Rails versus Grails

Hu, the performance wars seem to have to started. I’m not really into performance, as long as it’s fast enough. But some people demand an optimized Rails setup. As far as I’m concerned the benchmarks by Graeme was about two out of the box solutions. They showed that people can decide to use Grails over Rails without fear of a slow solution. If people earn money with Rails they can with Grails. There is no sense in optimizing one solution without the other. Right out of my head there are some optimizations for the Grails setup one might try:

- Use the fastest JDK, not JDK 5 but JDK 6 (7? Or 3rd party JDK). JDK 5 is not the fastest one
- Use the JDK on the fastest plattform
- Use fastest database (H2 not MySQL)
- Tune VM parameters (GC and object creation)
- Use faster application sever (Resin instead of Tomcat?)

These are very easy ones, just change the command line or the application setup. More diffucult optimizations are Hibernate tuning or using another ORM (Toplink?), move to a clustered setup (makes only sense with several servers), caching etc.

I think I’ll take a look into some of the options, just to tune my Grails application.

Update: After some research, Resin in the open source version is quite slow, Jetty might be slightly faster than Tomcat

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