This is a demo project, which accompanied my "Shoot-out! Template engines for the JVM" presentation, which shows the differences among several Java template engines in combination with Spring MVC. Template engines used in this project are:
- JSP + JSTL - v1.2
- Freemarker - v2.3.28.RELEASE
- Velocity - v2.3
- Velocity Tools - v3.1
- Thymeleaf - v3.0.11.RELEASE
- Mustache - Based on JMustache - v1.15
- Scalate - v1.9.8
- Jade4j - v1.3.1
- HTTL - v1.0.11
- Pebble - v3.1.6
- Handlebars - v4.3.1
- chunk - v3.6.2
- HtmlFlow - v4.0
- Trimou - v2.5.1.Final
- Rocker - v1.3.0
- Ickenham - v1.5.0
- Rythm - v1.4.1
- Groovy Templates - v2.5.6
- Liqp - Jekyll - v0.8.5.3
- kolinx.html - v1.8.22
You need Java 8 and Maven 3 to build and run this project. Build the project with
mvn package
Run the project with
mvn spring-boot:run
See the demo URLs:
- http://localhost:8080/jsp or http://localhost:8080/
- http://localhost:8080/freemarker
- http://localhost:8080/velocity
- http://localhost:8080/thymeleaf
- http://localhost:8080/jade
- http://localhost:8080/scalate
- http://localhost:8080/mustache
- http://localhost:8080/pebble
- http://localhost:8080/handlebars
- http://localhost:8080/httl
- http://localhost:8080/chunk
- http://localhost:8080/htmlFlow
- http://localhost:8080/trimou
- http://localhost:8080/rocker
- http://localhost:8080/ickenham
- http://localhost:8080/rythm
- http://localhost:8080/groovy
- http://localhost:8080/liqp
- http://localhost:8080/kotlinx
In case you want to benchmark the different template engines I would recommend using Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool or Siege an HTTP/HTTPS stress tester. You can try any of the following URLs.
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/jsp
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/velocity
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/freemarker
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/thymeleaf
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/mustache
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/jade
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/pebble
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/handlebars
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/scalate
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/httl
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/chunk
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/htmlFlow
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/trimou
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/rocker
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/ickenham
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/rythm
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/groovy
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/liqp
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/kotlinx
For creating the below benchmark results I used ApacheBench (version 2.4.25) with the following settings:
ab -n 25000 -c 25 -k http://localhost:8080/jsp
With 25 concurrent requests and 25.000 requests in total this resulted in the following numbers:
These tests were done on a local machine with the following specs:
Spring-Boot: 2.1.2.RELEASE
Windows 10 (1803, build: 17134.523)
3,60 GHz Intel Core i5-8350U Quad core
java version "1.8.0_192"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_192-b12)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.192-b12, mixed mode)
Apache Tomcat 9.0.14
Results in order (high to low):
Total time taken for processing 25.000 requests with a concurrency level of 25 (lower is better).
Jade4j 567.7 seconds
Handlebars 147.7 seconds
Scalate - Scaml 33.33 seconds
Pebble 27.92 seconds
HTTL 24.61 seconds
Thymeleaf 24.09 seconds
Velocity 23.07 seconds
Freemarker 11.80 seconds
jTwig 10.95 seconds
Mustache (JMustache) 8.836 seconds
JSP 7.888 seconds
These tests were done on a local machine with the following specs:
Spring-Boot: 2.1.4.RELEASE
Windows 10 (1803, build: 17134.706)
3,60 GHz Intel Core i5-8350U Quad core
java version "1.8.0_221"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_221-b11)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.221-b11, mixed mode)
Apache Tomcat 9.0.17
Results in order (high to low):
Total time taken for processing 25.000 requests with a concurrency level of 25. (lower is better)
Groovy ~ 800 seconds
Jade4j 684.7 seconds
Handlebars 161.8 seconds
Scalate - Scaml 34.38 seconds
Velocity 27.49 seconds
Pebble 25.63 seconds
HTTL 22.86 seconds
jTwig 21.23 seconds
Liqp 19.60 seconds
Ickenham 19.50 seconds
Thymeleaf 18.33 seconds
Rythm 17.84 seconds
Rocker 17.63 seconds
Mustache (JMustache) 15.75 seconds
HtmlFlow 15.62 seconds
Chunk 15.04 seconds
Trimou 15.02 seconds
Freemarker 14.74 seconds
JSP 11.22 seconds
Keep in mind that in the real world, these results will differ depending on the complexity of the templates, hardware, etc, so it's just an indication and if you want to know the truth you will have to run the benchmark yourself to see how such a template engine performs in your specific environment.
Chunk produces pages with variable length. I haven't investigated it yet. ab might fail, and for Chunk use:
$ ab -n 25000 -c 25 -l http://localhost:8080/chunk
Before the performance of each template engines was measured, there were at least 2 dry runs with the exact same settings, to make sure that initialization of the engines, warm up of the JVM and additional caches have taken place. There were at least 5 iterations of the same benchmark before calculating the average time it took.
Mac OS X has only 16K ports available that won't be released until socket TIME_WAIT is passed. The default timeout for TIME_WAIT is 15 seconds. Consider reducing in case of available port bottleneck.
You can check whether this is a problem with netstat:
# sysctl net.inet.tcp.msl
net.inet.tcp.msl: 15000
Now if you want to change this you can do so by doing:
# sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.msl=1000
net.inet.tcp.msl: 15000 -> 1000
In case you still run into problem you might want to read this thread on ephemeral ports.
In case you see an improvement to the benchmark or know about ways to improve the results, please file an issue and send a pull request.
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