Sun Java System Message Queue 4.3 Administration Guide

Benchmarks

Benchmarking is the process of creating a test suite for your messaging application and of measuring message throughput or other aspects of performance for this test suite.

For example, you could create a test suite by which some number of producing clients, using some number of connections, sessions, and message producers, send persistent or nonpersistent messages of a standard size to some number of queues or topics (all depending on your messaging application design) at some specified rate. Similarly, the test suite includes some number of consuming clients, using some number of connections, sessions, and message consumers (of a particular type) that consume the messages in the test suite’s physical destinations using a particular acknowledgment mode.

Using your standard test suite you can measure the time it takes between production and consumption of messages or the average message throughput rate, and you can monitor the system to observe connection thread usage, message storage data, message flow data, and other relevant metrics. You can then ramp up the rate of message production, or the number of message producers, or other variables, until performance is negatively affected. The maximum throughput you can achieve is a benchmark for your message service configuration.

Using this benchmark, you can modify some of the characteristics of your test suite. By carefully controlling all the factors that might have an effect on performance (see Application Design Factors Affecting Performance), you can note how changing some of these factors affects the benchmark. For example, you can increase the number of connections or the size of messages five-fold or ten-fold, and note the effect on performance.

Conversely, you can keep application-based factors constant and change your broker configuration in some controlled way (for example, change connection properties, thread pool properties, JVM memory limits, limit behaviors, file-based versus JDBC-based persistence, and so forth) and note how these changes affect performance.

This benchmarking of your application provides information that can be valuable when you want to increase the performance of a deployed application by tuning your message service. A benchmark allows the effect of a change or a set of changes to be more accurately predicted.

As a general rule, benchmarks should be run in a controlled test environment and for a long enough period of time for your message service to stabilize. (Performance is negatively affected at startup by the just-in-time compilation that turns Java code into machine code.)