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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

I remember early versions of Java not running terribly well on Linux. It ran, but performance was bad. I'm thinking the 1.2 and 1.3 versions. I worked for a startup and did some Java and Oracle work around that time, moving apps from Sun to Linux based demo systems.

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Can confirm. Around 2000 - 2001, on RedHat 6 or 7.something Sun's 1.2 JVM was basically unusable: slow and extremely buggy. IBM's JVM (HotJava? - it's all so long ago I can't remember what it was called) was much better: it was a bit faster and it didn't fall over for a pasttime. The 1.3 releases were better but still not much to shout about. I can't remember whether the 1.3 Sun JVMs were good enough to allow us to run our software with them at the time.

(Topically, at around this time, we were targeting Solaris 6.x and 7.x based systems.)

Java on Linux was interpreted until 1.3.1/1.4 when the VM, named ExactVM, was replaced by HotSpot which includes a JIT.

At that time, I remember deciding to prototype a B2B store in Java and then rewrite it in C++ when i will know what i was doing. I never rewrite that soft because Java becomes fast enough overnight.

In a sense, SUN kill itself with Java.

Makes sense. Sun peaked during the dot-com boom. I worked at several different startups, both full time and as side gigs, and they all had Suns. I remember Enterprise 3500's and later 250 and 450's being popular around that time.

After the crash, you had to basically give that stuff away. I knew a guy who had 10 Sun boxes (all less than 5 years old) at home because a local company wrote them off. I had a couple of low end Ultras (an Ultra 2 and Ultra 10) but sold one of them off. The Ultra 2 I got used for pennies on the dollar at an auction. I think it was like $200 for what was a $15K machine years earlier.

Sun was so far ahead of it time. Solaris was a solid OS, but once Linux became "good enough", somewhere in the '99 to '03 timeframe, depending on industry, it was over for them.

To add: this is Red Hat Linux 6 or 7, not Red Hat Enterprise Linux - I fondly remember RHL 7.3 in 2002 as the last RedHat I liked; updates were still through RHN or Red Carpet (don’t remember if yum was already used).

RHEL, Fedora etc arrived later.

Yes, exactly, when RedHat was still RedHat as it were: I haven't used either Fedora or RHEL since that division took place. Tbh that's more about circumstance than coming at it with any particular axe to grind but, these days, I can't see much of a reason to choose either of them over Ubuntu. Not for the projects I'm involved with, anyway.

I honestly remember them not running that well on Sun, either: in the 90s, I could consistently get Java on windows to outperform Java on Sun.

I'm not surprised. Early Sparc chips weren't much to write home about. I had a Sparc 10 at home for a while. It made a great X11 desktop. The later UltraSparc systems, like the Enterprise series, were powerful, supported tons of CPUs, memory, and IO but single threaded CPU performance still wasn't stellar.

At one startup, we had like 10 people logged in to a E3500 for Java builds. The thing had 512 megs of RAM, huge for the time, but with 10 people compiling and running java apps with a min heap of 64 megs, you got into swap pretty quick. It had these enormous disk arrays attached. I think it was 2x Sun Storage arrays with 16 disks each, each one being like 20 gigs or something, for a total of 640 gigs before the RAID. We were also running a database instance on the single box (Sybase, I think), which didn't help. A lot of people started running their apps on their Windows desktops.

This was pretty early, late 98 or early 99. We basically had built our own app server on top of Apache JServ, which predated Tomcat.

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