Websphere sucks…
… BIG TIME
Why ?
- Reliability: This thing takes IBM literally years to stabilise. I personally enjoying it myself, with my manager calling me “why the website is down ?”, and to find out that Websphere has fell down again for no clear reason. And we’re only using it for running our CMS for God’s sake (think Mambo, Drupal, PostNuke, etc) - it’s not something terribly sophisticated ! In fact, that CMS is actually developed in Tomcat ! So it’s not even using the full feature of J2EE offered by Websphere. Still, Websphere is having problems running this
- Forced upgrade: It all started pleasantly - the IBM consultants ran the excellent presentation on Websphere, and the price was reasonable too. Fast forwards several months - we’re having reliability issues with it. We inquired IBM about this, and their reply was some sort of “well, we no longer support that old version (what !!), so if you want to get our support, you better upgrade it to the latest one”. Then we found out the nasty surprise of the upgrade cost…
- Cost : Latest versions of Websphere are so expensive, once it was priced 8x (eight times) higher than the alternative solution based on Tomcat. Basically, picture yourself a big, bad, Sun server; with multiple UltraSPARC processors, and gigabytes of RAM. OK, basically, the Websphere license cost was enough to buy 2 of those. Do I still need to tell you which one got chosen by the project manager ?
- Scalability: An analyst defended Websphere saying that it’s the right choice when you need scalability in a system. Sorry, but, scalability my a$$. Basically, despite given the best server in the system, Websphere consistently managed to still become the bottleneck of that system. I ran a set of load-tests a few months ago against a system, which include a Compaq DL380 and a big Sun server running Websphere. That Compaq DL380 runs 3 virtual servers (using VMware) , yet it’s load consistently hovered around 1%-2%. The Sun server (that runs Websphere) however, kept on falling over flat on its face, with 100% system load.
- A bloated pig: I think by now you’ll understand already that Websphere is basically a massive bloated software, with low performance level compared against other similar software, despite attempts by (very expensive!) IBM consultants to tweak its performance.
It’s a massive bloat, it’s slow, it’s unreliable, and it’s priced to burn a seriously big hole in your wallet.
Stay as far away as possible from it.
UPDATE:
# There’s a reason why Microsoft picked Websphere in their effort to promote .Net against Java
# Finally IBM will revamp Websphere’s reliability and performance. Or is it possible that I’m rejoicing too soon ?
December 1st, 2004 15:32
Why companies insist to buy expensive software, when cheap (or free) software would probably do even better?
December 4th, 2004 03:07
Why indeed
Anyway, I think it’s because things like these are decided by high-level managers. Then when things go wrong, instead of acknowledging the problem and told us to look for alternatives; they go all defensive, and insisted that we continue using it *sigh*
June 30th, 2006 23:27
Yes I agree. I have just spent the last two weeks trying to get my app to work on WebSphere with no luck. The same application works wonderfully on both Jboss and a stand alone tomcat server. But Ibm tells me my application has design issues.
July 1st, 2006 11:50
That means you’ll need to code your app not according to the open standards - but adhering to Websphere’s own specification. This will make your app non-portable and risk locking yourself to Websphere.
In my case, despite the best attempts of IBM’s own consultants, they failed to make Websphere 100% rock solid. And they definitely failed to bring it anywhere close to Tomcat’s performance level (despite being hosted in one of our best server).
That really sucks. (especially if I remember the huge amount of money we paid them)
October 26th, 2007 01:57
Its a raining Thursday afternoon, and I was just banging my head again against websphere and its quirks. I just found that Websphere 6.1 doesn’t seem to bind local references to ejbs until after the servlet’s are initialized. Which is causing my lookup to fail during the servlet’s init() method.
Anyway, a simple google search got me to this page (searched “websphere sucks”). I just wanted to add to these comments to allow anyone who didn’t know this secret piece of knowledge to have yet one more person break the news to them.
Websphere sucks indeed!
Open source and transparency is the only way to go.
October 29th, 2007 16:43
@Brian - welcome to the club
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For those looking to be able to point fingers in case of problems, do feel free to go with these proprietary solutions and pay their expensive support fees.
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For those looking to be able to point fingers **and** have complete control of their system, go with the open source solutions and purchase a support contract from a provider.
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I know which one I’ll choose
November 2nd, 2007 19:39
[...] Harry has an interesting article about it, just read http://harry.sufehmi.com/archives/2004-11-30-755/ [...]
November 14th, 2007 01:36
[...] My experience with eclipse-based, Open Source Java culture should permit me to avoid buying more Adobe products through ‘coercion.’ I pay money for Photoshop because I want to—even as I used the GIMP to prep the image in this Blog post. The last time I wanted to buy Flash was when it was version 5. I get tired of paying Macromedia/Adobe to produce incomplete software development products. It feels like I am paying them to learn how to build software tools—this is just too hard for me knowing what Microsoft does with Visual Studio and what the Eclipse Foundation does for free. And the punch line is that Flex Builder is built on top of eclipse! My assumption is that Adobe is trying to make Flex in particular and its developer tools story in general similar to what IBM is doing with its unimpressive Websphere black box. [...]
September 25th, 2008 06:51
I think that open source is the way to go, there is support for that also!