MVC app footprint

[Nathan Russell]

I'll start off by apologising for what on the surface appears to be a stupid question!

Does anyone know the memory & session footprint of a Spring MVC app?

OK, so there it is, thats the stupid question out of the way; and I know the answer is "How do we know, we haven't seen your app" and "profile it"


OK, so here's the full scenario:

We have an existing web app using a Java framework (not Spring). Part of this web app shouldn't really be there are its not part of the original business domain. The kind of thing that gets 'evolved' into an app over time
We have an opportunity to refactor this component out of the main app into a web app in its own right, and are also looking to use it as an opportunity to start using Spring MVC as our standard framework.

We have been trying to present this idea to the 'solutions architecture team' (yeah, I know ! ) because they caught wind of our plans to use a new technology! and one of the things they've asked is "what will the footprint of a Spring MVC app be?"

As we are only at the drawing board at the moment, we've not developed the app yet, so I cant profile it.
Does anyone know of any stats, benchmarks, or anything else I can quote?

The only other thing I could do is that I have a mostly developed proof of concept Spring MVC app. I could profile that, but its a completely different problem domain that its trying to solve, so I'm wondering what value it might have?

Any thoughts anyone?

Cheers

Nathan

[Mark Spritzler]

That is like asking, what is the footprint of Struts or Tapestry or Wicket or Stripes or JBoss Seam? There is no answer.

You can say that Spring MVC is used on many large websites like LinkedIn or www.pictage.com and many many many more and are very performant and robust.

(Pictage is actually the largest website in the world in HD space it uses. It is over 700 Terabytes, because it is storing professional photographer's photos, each photo usually a minimum of 10 MB, and they have to get those photos and have them on the website pages.)

Footprint is just an awful question that is asked, that has nothing to do with whether it is a better framework or faster than another. In many cases, Footprint can mean many different things. Like how much Heap Space do its objects take up. How much is it coupled into your code? How heavy does it affect performance? To me someone who asks you What the footprint just doesn't want to use something and tries to ask a vague question so that you can never answer them and they can say, then therefore we can't use it.

Spring MVC is very very robust and is used by a lot of websites, if it was heavy and bad, no one would use it. Yes that is even not a lot behind that answer to not be a falacy argument, but asking about FootPrint is a falacy question.

Mark

[Nathan Russell]

Thanks Mark,

To me someone who asks you What the footprint just doesn't want to use something and tries to ask a vague question so that you can never answer them and they can say, then therefore we can't use it.

Spot on; I think thats exactly why they have asked the question. There is some resistance about us changing anything at the moment, and it feels to me like this is a deliberately un-answerable question so that they can say not knowing the impact of the change is too risky and therefore a reason not to do it

Hey-ho!

Nathan

[Mark Spritzler]

Nathan Russell wrote:Thanks Mark,

To me someone who asks you What the footprint just doesn't want to use something and tries to ask a vague question so that you can never answer them and they can say, then therefore we can't use it.

Spot on; I think thats exactly why they have asked the question. There is some resistance about us changing anything at the moment, and it feels to me like this is a deliberately un-answerable question so that they can say not knowing the impact of the change is too risky and therefore a reason not to do it

Hey-ho!

Nathan

You can ask them, if it is so risky, why are companies like LinkedIn, Intuit, EA, PayPal and many many more all using it.