.NET versus J2EE - New case studies and benchmarks

New benchmark results comparing .NET 2.0 vs .NET 1.1 and J2EE platforms are now available.

1) Comparing XML Performance

XMLMark (a benchmark created by Sun Microsystems) was used by Microsoft to compare the performance of XML operations between .NET 2.0 Beta2, .NET 1.1, and Sun Java 1.5 platforms. The benchmark link is here.  

Conclusions:
The XML Mark 1.1 Benchmark Kit demonstrates that major improvements have been made with .NET 2.0 over the .NET 1.1 runtime for XML parsing. These improvements will impact both client and server programs that do any amount of direct XML manipulation. Furthermore, the results indicate that .NET 2.0 performs significantly better than the latest Sun Java 1.5 platform in XML parsing scenarios. We encourage customers to download the XML Mark 1.1 benchmark kit and test the scenarios for themselves.

2) Comparing Web Services Performance

WSTest is a Web Service benchmark created by Sun Microsystems and augmented by Microsoft. The benchmark tests various web service operations across varying SOAP object sizes.

This Microsoft paper published by Microsoft compares Web Services Performance for .NET 2.0, .NET 1.1, Sun JWSDP 1.5 and IBM WebSphere 6.0.

Conclusion:
Web Service performance has been significantly improved in .NET 2.0 vs. .NET 1.1. The WSTest 1.1 Benchmark kit, downloadable from MSDN, is a good tool to use to measure web service performance of different application server platforms, and to judge raw capacity of backend hardware for processing web service requests. Customers are encouraged to download the kit (inclusive of Mercury Scripts) and perform their own tests.

Downloadable sample code (and the detailed test methodology) is provided for all benchmarks.