Vaadin Blog

We spent the last SwingBridge release on improving memory usage, so that more users fit on one server. I wanted a number for it, not just my own opinion about how we built it.

SwingBridge runs your Swing application on a server and shows it in a browser, so a user opens a link instead of installing anything. Every user gets a session on that server, and every session costs memory. That cost is your server bill, which can be considerable for large installed bases.

So I asked Eftun Türkmen, our Engineering Manager on this work, to benchmark it. We chose a real Swing application, gave it a server of a fixed size, and counted how many user sessions can fit at once before the machine gives out. For comparison, we ran it for SwingBridge and for Webswing, a popular alternative, on the same box, with the same test. Both sides were tuned properly first.