Most recently submissions from HP and Sun running Weblogic 8.1 both matched Oracle's scores and in once case doubled Oracle's performance but at 7 times the cost.
The new BEA SPECjAppServer2002 records include:
- Fastest performance of any 4-CPU system in the dual-node category. Running BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 and BEA WebLogic JRockit 1.4.2 on an Intel Itanium 2 processor-based HP Integrity rx4640 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers 1710.23 [email protected] with a price-to-performance
ratio of only $115.72 USD/[email protected] - these results essentially match Oracle's own best performance in this area. - Fastest performance in the dual-node category. BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 on Sun Fire E6900 servers with UltraSPARC IV 1.2GHz processors running Solaris, delivers 4220.39 Total Operations Per Second ([email protected]) and
834.98 $/[email protected] BEA WebLogic running Solaris holds the top result; delivering more than twice the performance of the nearest closest competitor in this category, but at 7 times the cost of Oracle's top performing and best price/performance of 114.88.
Check out the latest results:
http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2002/results/res2005q1/
All results:
http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2002/results/jAppServer2002.html
And IBM's lone jAppServer2004 results:
http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2005q1/
These benchmarks are fairly useless in terms of making real buying decisions, they are useful from the perspective that it keeps the vendors continually optimizing and improving the performance of their application servers. What would be really interesting would be to see JBoss and JoNas competing here with the big boys.