Step 0: The Naive Approach

Scaling WebObjects
Example Apps
Step 0
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
Step 5
Step 6
Step 7
Step 8
Summary
Postscript

This is how NOT to deploy a web application. Its the most expensive way to do it, and its a waste of time and money to do it this way. If someone is on the net, complaining about the cost of WebObjects, you can be sure that this is the way that they're deploying it! For this approach, we're going to maximize everything and run it on one server.

So lets see. We'll buy Oracle 8e at $50,000, we'll buy a midrange Solaris box to run it on at $35,000. We'll buy WebObjects unlimited at $50,000.

So we're at $135,000 and we haven't even written one line of code yet! Or connected it to the internet.

This approach is typical of an MIS department "doing an internet application" to humor the CEO. This is not the way a professional WO development house would deploy WebObjects (and hopefully, not the way that anyone who reads this article would deploy WO).

To the MIS department, since engineering hours come out of the budget, while some executive has to sign personally for the WebObjects license, the total "political" cost of deployment is $125,000. The sticking point in this for them is usually the $50,000 WO license. And they have a point, $50K is a lot to pay for "middleware". So instead, they spend $100,000 engineering the application in Perl instead...

The thing is, you should never buy the unlimited WO license until you really need it, that is, when the WOStats page built into every WO application tells you that you need it!

Lets look at our internet service. We've only got a T1, or one 1.5Mbps channel to the internet. In bytes, that's 192K/second. In practice, you get about half that or 96K/second. Subtract out the handshaking and protocol overhead, and you end up at about 90K/second. For nile.com, that's two pages a second or 120 pages per minute. For Yippee.com, that's 9 pages/second or 540 pages per minute.

At those speeds, your deployment system is going to be sitting idle 90% of the time.

Lesson: You don't need Oracle 8e, a midrange Solaris box, and an unlimited WO license to serve a T1.

Which brings us to the right way to do it:

Next Page: Step 1, Starting Small