[coldtea]

>In my opinion, Java as a web language is good when you don't need to really understand what's happening (like in low-traffic situations)

Huh? Java is used in huge traffic backends, including HFT with minimal latencies acceptable all the way to Google and Twitter scale.

If anything, Java is much more fast and low level than the typical languages used for huge high-traffic services -- Rails, Python, etc - never mind about what's used in "low-traffic situations".

[lostcolony]

OP isn't comparing it to Rails, Python, etc. He's comparing it to Erlang.

ANd, to that, I'd agree. I've built high traffic stuff in Java. We built it, load tested it, it was terrible. After multiple rounds of profiling, tweaking GC settings, tweaking threadpool sizes, rewriting things to be async, finding out that a client library wasn't reusing connections properly, etc, we finally had acceptable performance...that still was less than I'd gotten out of the box in similar, IO bound services, written as unoptimized Erlang.