Advantages and Limitations of Compression

Although message compression has been added to improve performance, such benefit is not guaranteed. Benefits vary with the size and format of messages, the number of consumers, network bandwidth, and CPU performance. For example, the cost of compression and decompression might be higher than the time saved in sending and receiving a compressed message. This is especially true when sending small messages in a high-speed network. On the other hand, applications that publish large messages to many consumers or who publish in a slow network environment, might improve system performance by compressing messages.

Depending on the message body type, compression may also provide minimal or no benefit. An application client can use the JMS_SUN_UNCOMPRESSED_SIZE and JMS_SUN_COMPRESSED_SIZE properties to determine the benefit of compression for different message types.

Message consumers deployed with client runtime libraries that precede version 3.6 cannot handle compressed messages. Clients wishing to send compressed messages must make sure that consumers are compatible. C clients cannot currently consume compressed messages.