Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Zemian Deng on July 22, 2008 at 11:19am

Robert Dempsey said:

What I am looking for is performance comparisons of Groovy/Grails with other frameworks combined with Java such as Spring.

Hello Robert, Have you explored Scala programming? It gives you the short and flexibility of Groovy like expressiveness, but yet has good performance as close as to Java itself! Scala is static typed instead of dynamic though. Check out other post I made few days ago under Other JVM Group on this site see if you like it.
-Z

Permalink Reply by Jim  Moore on August 27, 2008 at 10:36pm

What needs to be performant and why? Things like Twitter are built on a notoriously slow platform (ie, Ruby on Rails) but it's plenty fast enough.

Grails is obviously slower than Spring MVC since it's built on old versions of Spring MVC and Spring WebFlow. Does it matter? For the vast majority of web sites the answer is trivially simple: No.

Scala is faster and slower than Java depending on what you're doing. Groovy is slower than both, but who cares? It's more than fast enough for what it's used for.

If you really need speed, write in assembly code. If you think that's not reasonable, then ask yourself why you're willing to sacrifice that speed to be able to write in Java. Then apply the same reasoning to why you would program in something like Grails.

Note that I'm not saying that you should use Grails, just that looking at performance without solid reasons *why* is well beyond foolish.

Permalink Reply by Jackie Gleason on October 15, 2009 at 5:07pm

There are some performance issues (For example I have been told my IDE friendly specific typing can cause issues) that make Scala/Java better for some high volume projects. However, for simplicity and readability groovy is a better way to develop, IMHO

Jackie

Permalink Reply by John Thompson on January 3, 2010 at 8:03am

To answer adoption - Grails is becoming more and more mainstream. Sky.com, Wired, and Walmart (specifically mp3.walmart.com) are some notable sites using Grails.

In benchmarking, yes, Grails is slower. But improvements are being made, both to Groovy and Grails itself.

And benchmarks are generally useless in the real world. Every application is different. Bad code, poor database design, poor technology choices, etc are going to have a far greater impact then the language used.

Where performance is an issue, you can always use Java (or Scala). In fact, much of the Grails framework is in Java, not Groovy. It all comes down to using the right tool for the job.

Also - in the age of distributed computing, I need to ask who cares if there is a 20-30% performance penalty. What does it matter if you need to spool up another VM or two in the cloud?