Comment by jiggawatts
2 months ago
It's a heavily gamed benchmark, but TechEmpower Fortunes is pretty good at revealing the max throughput of a language runtime for "specially tuned" code (instead of idiomatic code).
Java currently beats .NET by about 40%: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...
I judge more idiomatic / typical code complexity by the length of stack traces in production web app crashes. Enterprise Java apps can produce monstrous traces that are tens of pages long.
ASP.NET Core 9 is a bit worse than ASP.NET Web Forms used to be because of the increased flexibility and async capability, but it's still nowhere near as bad as a typical Java app.
In terms of code length / abstraction nonsense overhead, have a look at the new Minimal APIs for how lightweight code can get in modern C# web apps: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/m...
For those interested in performance ceiling, https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... provides additional data points.
What matters in practical scenarios is that ASP.NET Core is significantly faster than Spring Boot. If you have a team willing to use ActiveJ or Vert.x, you are just as likely have a team willing to customize their C# implementation to produce numbers just as good at web application tasks and much better at something lower level. There are also issues with TechEmpower that make it highly sensitive to specific HW/Kernel/Libraries combination in ways which alter the rankings significantly. .NET team hosts a farm to do their own TechEmpower runs and it just keeps regressing with each new version of Linux kernel (for all entries), despite CPU% going down and throughput improving in separate more isolated ASP.NET Core evaluations. Mind you, the architecture of ASP.NET Core + Kestrel, in my opinion, leaves some performance on the table, and I think Techempower is a decent demonstration of where you can expect the average framework performance to sit at once you start looking at specific popular options most teams use.