More on applets and codebase_lookup
As I mentioned in the last post I'm farting around with applets for work. You may remember that the applet was hammering the server whenever it couldn't find a resource in the jars. Of course, everything the applet needs is already in the jars so if it's not in them then it's not on the server either. It's all because the AppletClassLoader tries to load stuff from the codebase on the server if it fails to load it from the jars.
As part of the fix of setting codebase_lookup to false I did some very quick, unofficial benchmarking. The test environment was an EC2 deployment I've been messing around with–the smallest instance. I timed the startup time of the applet and counted the number of server hits during startup. To further minimize variablility, I did this after the jars had already been cached. This roughly corresponds to the startup time of a visitor to the site that has already successfully launched the applet. The results were as follows:
codebase_lookup – true (default setting)
Startup time: 35 seconds
Server hits: 442
codebase_lookup – false
Startup time: 7 seconds
Server hits: 34
When the the applet does hit the server to look stuff up in the code base, it doesn't just do it at startup. Some libraries that don't cache failed attempts to load a resource keep on hitting the server. In our app it's XFire and a lot of non-existent "aegis.xml" and "doc.xml" files as well as a whole bunch of "BeanInfo.class" attempts thanks to java.beans.Introspector. Each of these attempts takes a tiny bit of time and puts an annoying 404 in the access logs. It's hard to say what the distributed sluggishness of the app will be because of all these little attempts, but it's definitely non zero. It also has an affect on server side scalability when each client is potentially 13 times more chatty with the server than it needs to be.
An additional concern I have is that some of this cavalier attitude toward resource loading in these libraries also happens on the server side. How many failed getResourceAsStream attempts am I not seeing and what impact are they having on overall server performance? At the current traffic levels it's probably insignificant but the idea of that much inefficiency spread out throughout the app kind of bothers me.
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