Erik C. Thauvin (@erik.thauvin.net)

Scaling the Web: Jetty, Multi-Core, Performance Myths – Ludovic Orban | The Marco Show What does “web-scale” really mean? In this episode, Marco sits down with Ludovic Orban, performance engineer and Jetty maintainer, to unpack what it actually takes to build Java systems that handle massive traffic. We talk about the myths of “web scale,” why most companies don’t need billion-request architectures, and what changed when CPUs stopped getting faster and instead started adding more cores. Ludovic shares wild stories from Terracotta’s clustered JVM, building his own distributed transaction manager, and decades of Java performance work. In this episode: – What “web scale” is (and isn’t) – How Jetty became a fast, lightweight web server – Why multi-core CPUs reshaped performance engineering – Why memory is now the real bottleneck – When distributed transactions make sense, and when they absolutely don’t – Why AI-generated code is still risky 🎁 Giveaway: Guess how many Jetty bugs Ludovic fixed in September + October. Closest answer wins JetBrains merch or a 1-year JetBrains license. Comment your guess! ⏱️ Timestamps: 00:00 Teaser 01:10 Who is Ludovic Orban? 02:04 What “web scale” really means, and who actually needs it 03:54 How hardware changes reshaped software performance 06:28 Cloud, containers, and why performance still matters 07:28 Jetty vs Tomcat: history, adoption & performance 10:47 What makes Jetty “fast” in practice 13:21 How the Jetty team prioritizes performance 15:10 Recent work: fixing complex HTTP/2 bugs 16:38 How WebTide supports customers beyond Jetty issues 17:52 Bitronix: Why Ludovic built his own transaction manager 20:45 Open-source challenges. The rise and fall of Bitronix 24:19 Distributed transactions vs compensating transactions 27:07 Where to learn more: Atomikos and modern approaches 28:25 Terracotta: clustering JVMs and wild engineering stories 31:20 What Terracotta taught him about the JVM 33:48 Real-world Java performance mistakes developers make 40:22 Why learning performance is so hard 45:40 Kubernetes, abstraction, and performance visibility 48:50 Hardware that excites Ludovic: Oxide Computer 50:42 His take on AI and why he doesn’t trust generated code 53:30 Lessons from Jetty, Terracotta, Bitronix, and Quartz 56:10 Rapid-fire questions 01:01:15 Giveaway and outro Follow Ludovic: X: https://twitter.com/bitronix Follow The Marco Show: Instagram: https://instagram.com/themarco.show Join us: Website: https://jb.gg/website Blog: https://jb.gg/blog X: https://twitter.com/intellijidea Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/intellijidea.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/intellijidea Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IntelliJIDEA/ Download IntelliJ IDEA: https://jb.gg/download-intellij-idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJvg5zTKHeE