Jetty and Tomcat are both open servlet containers, which support HTTP server, HTTP client, and javax.servlet container. in this article, we will quick view the difference between Jetty and Tomcat, so which eventually is better one?

You may think it is out-of-box question to compare Jetty and tomcat. Tomcat is obviously and frequently discussed as well as support more features to developers. Yes, I cannot say no, We started using tomcat during development as it is free, Its an foremost application server and provided full web server functions and can be stripped down to be embedded or built up an full JEE server.

Jetty is a uniformly excellent tool about particularly feature. It has been started around since 1998 and claims to be a “100% Java HTTP Server and Servlet Container”. It is a foremost a set of software components that offer HTTP and servlet services. Jetty can be installed as a standalone application server or be easily embedded in an application or framework as a HTTP component. It is a simple servlet engine, as do a feature rich servlet engine or as do part of a full JEE environment.

Jetty Features and Powered:

  • Full-featured and standards-based.
  • Embeddable and Asynchronous.
  • Open source and commercially usable.
  • Dual licensed under Apache and Eclipse.
  • Flexible and extensible, Enterprise scalable.
  • Strong Tools, Application, Devices and Cloud computing supported.
  • Low maintenance cost.
  • Small and Efficient.

Tomcat Features and Powered:

  • Famous open source under Apache.
  • Easier to embed Tomcat in your applications, e.g. in JBoss.
  • Implements the Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2 and JSP-EL 2.2 support.
  • Strong and widely commercially usable and use.
  • Easy integrated with other application such as Spring.
  • Flexible and extensible, Enterprise scalable.
  • Faster JSP parsing.
  • Stable.

Jetty VS Tomcat Comparison on Performance

Test Environment:
CPU: Intel Core Dou T6400 2.0GHz
RAM: 2G
JDK: Jvm sun 1.6
OS: Ubuntu

I did few cases on Performance side between Tomcat and Jetty, its such simple so that it could not fully report which one presents better.

I developed a servlet whose url is /servlet/TestRuning.

  PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
  String aStr = request.getParameter("a");
  String bStr = request.getParameter("b");

  int a = 100;
  int b = 100;

  try{
   a = Integer.parseInt(aStr);
   b = Integer.parseInt(bStr);
  }catch(Exception excep){
   System.err.println("err:" + excep.getMessage());
  }
  int sum = 0;
  long s = System.currentTimeMillis();
  for(int i = 0; i < a; ++i){
   for(int ii = 0; ii < b; ++ii){
    sum = a / b;
   }
  }
  long e = System.currentTimeMillis();
  long d = e - s;
  out.println( d );

  out.flush();
  out.close();

Code is simple, Just involves two loop and few mathematics. As well as We deployed this application under Jetty and Tomcat respectively with default configuration.

Note We was using the same JRE version.

wapproxy@ubuntu:~$ ps -ef | grep java
wapproxy  2076     1  1 11:28 ?        00:00:03 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java -Djetty.home=/home/wapproxy/jetty -Djava.io.tmpdir=/tmp -jar /home/wapproxy/jetty/start.jar /home/wapproxy/jetty/etc/jetty-logging.xml /home/wapproxy/jetty/etc/jetty.xml
wapproxy  2185  1398  8 11:30 pts/0    00:00:02 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/home/wapproxy/Tomcat/conf/logging.properties -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/home/wapproxy/Tomcat/endorsed -classpath :/home/wapproxy/Tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar -Dcatalina.base=/home/wapproxy/Tomcat -Dcatalina.home=/home/wapproxy/Tomcat -Djava.io.tmpdir=/home/wapproxy/Tomcat/temp org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start
wapproxy  2329  2309  0 11:31 pts/1    00:00:00 grep --color=auto java

The tomcat startup port was 8888 and Jetty port was 8080, Then we did pressure test:

This is Jetty Performance reports:

Server Software:        Jetty(6.1.22)
Server Hostname:        172.31.36.158
Server Port:            8080

Document Path:          /jt_jt/servlet/TestRuning?a=100000&b=100000
Document Length:        2 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   8.715 seconds
Complete requests:      5000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      445000 bytes
HTML transferred:       10000 bytes
Requests per second:    573.72 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1.743 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.743 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          49.86 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   1.1      0       5
Processing:     0    1   7.1      0      50
Waiting:        0    1   7.1      0      50
Total:          0    2   7.2      0      50

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      0
  66%      0
  75%      0
  80%      0
  90%      5
  95%      5
  98%     45
  99%     50
 100%     50 (longest request)

This is Tomcat Performance reports:

Server Software:        Apache-Coyote/1.1
Server Hostname:        172.31.36.158
Server Port:            8888

Document Path:          /jt_jt/servlet/TestRuning?a=100000&b=100000
Document Length:        3 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   4.070 seconds
Complete requests:      5000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      650000 bytes
HTML transferred:       15000 bytes
Requests per second:    1228.50 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       0.814 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.814 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          155.96 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   1.2      0       5
Processing:     0    0   1.7      0      45
Waiting:        0    0   1.7      0      45
Total:          0    1   2.1      0      45

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      0
  66%      0
  75%      0
  80%      0
  90%      5
  95%      5
  98%      5
  99%      5
 100%     45 (longest request)

We fingered out the key data on testing Jetty and Tomcat:

jetty 8080 Requests per second:    573.72 [#/sec] (mean)
tomcat 8888  Requests per second:    1228.50 [#/sec] (mean)

It shows that Jetty processed 573 requests and tomcat processed 1228 requests each second, from this data statistics, Tomcat did a little bit better.

More testing on Tomcat

Concurrent Requests Requests Waitting Time Requests Handling Time Throughput
1 0.422 0.422 2370.37
5 1.641 0.328 3047.62
10 3.125 0.313 3200
20 6.563 0.328 3047.62
40 12.5 0.313 3200
60 20.625 0.344 2909.09
80 25 0.313 3200
100 34.375 0.344 2909.09
200 596.875 2.984 335.08
300 618.75 2.063 484.85
400 1006.25 02.516 397.52

Jetty VS Tomcat

More testing on Jetty

Concurrent Requests Requests Waitting Time Requests Handling Time Throughput
1 6.391 6.391 156.48
5 11.484 2.297 435.37
10 19.063 1.906 524.59
20 25.625 1.281 780.49
40 0.797 31.875 1254.9
60 6.578 394.688 152.02
80 5.563 445 179.78
100 1.781 178.125 561.4
200 6.984 1396.875 143.18
300 3.109 932.813 321.61
400 6.531 2612.813 153.11

Jetty VS Tomcat

As I mentioned, You don’t take it so serious as it is just referred one aspect of their Performance. If you have any questions please let me know.

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