J2EE infrastructure scalability and throughput estimation

ECperf, the widely recognized industry standard J2EE benchmark, has attracted a large number of results submissions and their subsequent publication. However, ECperf places little restriction on the hardware platform, operating systems and databases utilized in the benchmarking process. This, combined with the existence of only two primary metrics, makes it difficult to accurately compare the results, or the performance of the Application Server products themselves. By mining the full-disclosure archives for trends and correlations we have discovered that J2EE technology is very scalable with increasing middle-tier resources, as long as the database has sufficient resources to prevent it becoming a bottleneck. Other observed trends include, a linear correlation between middle-tier total processing power and throughput, as well as between J2EE Application Server license costs and throughput. However, the results clearly indicate that there is an increasing cost per user with increasing capacity systems. Finally, the correlation between middle-tier processing power and throughput, combined with results obtained from a different 'lighter-weight' benchmark, facilitates an estimate of throughput for different types of J2EE applications.