I developed a project java about 4 months involving hundreds of people connected concurrently to a server. In development (on an NT machine) everything ran smoothly, but upon deployment to a Linux server the VM would often cause a segmentation fault. Further investigation showed that these would always happen when 256 threads were running. Unfortunately as java tcp sockets currently have no select() method (yet) each socket needed it's own thread so I was stumped. Over the course of a month, I tried many different linux distributions, kernels, and VMs (including virtually every IBM, Blackdown and Kaffe one) with no joy and even tried playing around with the sourcecode to the kernel to increase the threads - with no joy. Eventually the application was moved to a box running Solaris7 and the SunVM and it ran with no problems. I am now faced with a project to be produced by the middle of February, and would really prefer to go with Linux over Solaris (for a variety of non-orion-related reasons) but am concerned about the linux threading problem. The site in question will be very heavily hit and it is feasible that hundreds of people could be requesting information at the same time. I really need advice on whether it's sensible to go with Orion on Linux. Also, can someone advise me on which VM to use. I believe the only two 1.2 VM's available for Linux are the BlackDown and the Sun ones. The sun VM has very good reports so far, but I believe it's based on an earlier version of the Blackdown one, which is now far better. Thanks in advance -Joe Walnes
