Performance Evaluation of a Java Based Chat System

This article describes the LuChat chat system, which is a specific instance of a web based collaborative white-board style of application. To increase portability of our system among the most popular browsers, we implemented our own (subset of) the Java RMI framework, which requires no installation effort on the client side and still runs in both Netscape and Internet Explorer. The performance of our RMI system is comparable to the Java RMI version that comes with Netscape's Java virtual machine. The response time of our complete system under light load is under 30 ms, with the two most popular browsers having a response time of under 15 ms. Under normal use, our system will scale to a high number of clients.