WebSphere Liberty Profile (Quick Performance View)

I've had the pleasure of developing a new application on the WebSphere Liberty Profile for the last week.  I wanted to take the time to write a quick summary of my experience.  While there is very cool and interesting blogs proving the point of the small nature of the server documented by running the profile on Raspberry Pi, I wanted to take some time to document my experience developing on the profile to talk in terms that matter to the typical developer.

Some "performance" points:

1. At one point, I got the server into a non-recoverable state.  Later, Alasdair told me how I could have fixed the issue, but the server creation time made it pretty much a non issue.  I was able to delete the server directory for the server I was working on, run the server creation command (server.bat create server1), re-run my ant script to repopulate the dropins directory with my application and restart the new server in about two minutes.
2. Speaking of repopulating the dropins directory with my application, the normal reployment of an application is FAST.  My war file is about 5 megs, of which 4.5 is library jar files under WEB-INF\lib.  I typically see a redeployment time of about four seconds.  To make this truly interesting, this is the server started with debugging.  If I'm not debugging, it usually takes around 3 seconds for redeploys.  I pretty much call this instantaneous as it takes just about that long to swap from eclipse ant build back to my browser for testing.  Every once and a while I'll catch the application in deployment getting a 404 error, but a refresh always is all it takes to see the app show up.  I used to think about checking Twitter, Facebook between app deployments but now I can't.  Now I can keep working though basically an immediate compile, deploy, test life cycle.  Darn it, no productivity distractions any more.
3. I don't restart the server at all during the day, but it's worth stating server start up time.  With this application deployed, it takes about seven seconds to start the server.
4. I haven't yet tuned the server at all.  I just point the server to my IBM Java for JAVA_HOME and start the server.  That means I'm not tuning the heap or thread pools or anything like that.  Granted, so far, I'm just doing single user testing of my application.  But that said, here is what my process explorer reports about the instance:

• Virtual memory size = 1.5G, peak private bytes = 144M, peaking working set = 160M
• I didn't specify any Java command line options, but it looks like the start-up script sets -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

All of these numbers are from my laptop which is a Thinkpad W500 which is a  2 core x 2.53GHz Intel Core Duo, with 4G of memory (2.5 usable as I didn't install 64-bit Windows), with a SSD Disk (btw, get a SSD Disk, spinning disks are horrible!).

All in all, this server is a joy to develop applications on.  Congrats to the WebSphere Liberty team!