I tried running a couple of simple webapps that I currently run on JBoss 4.x on Glassfish V1 (including this website and blog), and was surprised to find out that my apps ran painfully slow. This was just an observation, I don’t have any exact timings, but where my webapps on JBoss 4 the pages load within the snap of your fingers, on Glassfish V1 it seems that pages were taking a couple of seconds to come back, and it didn’t improve even after successive page hits.
I heard on the JavaPosse’s interview with the Glassfish developer guys that the Final Release Candidate for V2 has a number of performance improvements (since V1 was just a developer release), so I’m interested to give it another try sometime soon.
I’ve used JBoss for a number of years to run my sites, but from being used to using Weblogic and Websphere during my ‘day job’, I’m used to having a rich administration front end, which I think is the one area where JBoss lacks. Glassfish on the otherhand has an admin console to compare with the big guys, and this is particularly attractive to me. I’ll post an update when I’ve tried it out again.