Factors Affecting Performance

Application design decisions can have a significant effect on overall messaging performance. The most important factors affecting performance are those that impact the reliability of message delivery; among these are the following:

• Delivery Mode (Persistent/Nonpersistent)

• Use of Transactions

• Acknowledgment Mode

• Durable vs. Nondurable Subscriptions

Other application design factors impacting performance include the following:

• Use of Selectors (Message Filtering)

• Message Size

• Message Body Type

The sections that follow describe the impact of each of these factors on messaging performance. As a general rule, there is a trade-off between performance and reliability: factors that increase reliability tend to decrease performance.

Table 3-4 shows how application design factors affect messaging performance. The table shows two scenarios—a high-reliability, low-performance scenario and a high-performance, low-reliability scenario—and the choice of application design factors that characterizes each. Between these extremes, there are many choices and trade-offs that affect both reliability and performance.

Table 3-4 Comparison of High Reliability and High Performance Scenarios

Delivery Mode (Persistent/Nonpersistent)

Persistent messages guarantee message delivery in case of broker failure. The broker stores these message in a persistent store until all intended consumers acknowledge that they have consumed the message.

Broker processing of persistent messages is slower than for nonpersistent messages for the following reasons:

• A broker must reliably store a persistent message so that it will not be lost should the broker fail.

• The broker must confirm receipt of each persistent message it receives. Delivery to the broker is guaranteed once the method producing the message returns without an exception.

• Depending on the client acknowledgment mode, the broker might need to confirm a consuming client’s acknowledgment of a persistent message.

For both queues and topics with durable subscribers, performance was approximately 40% faster for non-persistent messages. We obtained these results using 10K-size messages and AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE mode.

Use of Transactions

A transaction guarantees that all messages produced in a transacted session and all messages consumed in a transacted session will be either processed or not processed (rolled back) as a unit. Message Queue supports both local and distributed transactions.

A message produced or acknowledged in a transacted session is slower than in a non-transacted session for the following reasons:

• Additional information must be stored with each produced message.

• In some situations, messages in a transaction are stored when normally they would not be. For example, a persistent message delivered to a topic destination with no subscriptions would normally be deleted, however, at the time the transaction is begun, information about subscriptions is not available.

• Information on the consumption and acknowledgment of messages within a transaction must be stored and processed when the transaction is committed.

Acknowledgment Mode

Other than using transactions, you can ensure reliable delivery by having the client acknowledge receiving a message. If a session is closed without the client acknowledging the message or if the message broker fails before the acknowledgment is processed, the broker redelivers that message, setting a JMSRedelivered flag.

For a non-transacted session, the client can choose one of three acknowledgment modes, each of which has its own performance characteristics:

• AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE. The system automatically acknowledges a message once the consumer has processed it. This mode guarantees at most one redelivered message after a provider failure.

• CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE. The application controls the point at which messages are acknowledged. All messages processed in that session since the previous acknowledgment are acknowledged. If the broker fails while processing a set of acknowledgments, one or more messages in that group might be redelivered.

  (Using CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE mode is similar to using transactions, except there is no guarantee that all acknowledgments will be processed together if a provider fails during processing.)

• DUPS_OK_ACKNOWLEDGE. This mode instructs the system to acknowledge messages in a lazy manner. Multiple messages can be redelivered after a provider failure.

• NO_ACKNOWLEDGE In this mode, the broker considers a message acknowledged as soon as it has been written to the client. The broker does not wait for an acknowledgment from the receiving client. This mode is best used by typic subscribers who are not worried about reliability.

Performance is impacted by acknowledgment mode for the following reasons:

• Extra control messages between broker and client are required in AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE and CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE modes. The additional control messages add processing overhead and can interfere with JMS payload messages, causing processing delays.

• In AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE and CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE modes, the client must wait until the broker confirms that it has processed the client’s acknowledgment before the client can consume more messages. (This broker confirmation guarantees that the broker will not inadvertently redeliver these messages.)

• The Message Queue persistent store must be updated with the acknowledgment information for all persistent messages received by consumers, thereby decreasing performance.

Durable vs. Nondurable Subscriptions

Subscribers to a topic destination have either durable and nondurable subscriptions. Durable subscriptions provide increased reliability at the cost of slower throughput for the following reasons:

• The Message Queue message broker must persistently store the list of messages assigned to each durable subscription so that should the broker fail, the list is available after recovery.

• Persistent messages for durable subscriptions are stored persistently, so that should a broker fail, the messages can still be delivered after recovery, when the corresponding consumer becomes active. By contrast, persistent messages for nondurable subscriptions are not stored persistently (should a broker fail, the corresponding consumer connection is lost and the message would never be delivered).

We compared performance for durable and non-durable subscribers in two cases: persistent and nonpersistent 10k-sized messages. Both cases use AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE acknowledgment mode. We found a performance impact only in the case of persistent messages, which slowed messages conveyed to durable subscribers by about 30%.

Use of Selectors (Message Filtering)

Application developers can have the messaging provider sort messages according to criteria specified in the message selector associated with a consumer and deliver to that consumer only those messages whose property value matches the message selector. For example, if an application creates a subscriber to the topic WidgetOrders and specifies the expression NumberOfOrders >1000 for the message selector, messages with a NumberOfOrders property value of 1001 or more are delivered to that subscriber.

Creating consumers with selectors lowers performance (as compared to using multiple destinations) because additional processing is required to handle each message. When a selector is used, it must be parsed so that it can be matched against future messages. Additionally, the message properties of each message must be retrieved and compared against the selector as each message is routed. However, using selectors provides more flexibility in a messaging application and may lower resource requirements at the expense of speed.

Message Size

Message size affects performance because more data must be passed from producing client to broker and from broker to consuming client, and because for persistent messages a larger message must be stored.

However, by batching smaller messages into a single message, the routing and processing of individual messages can be minimized, providing an overall performance gain. In this case, information about the state of individual messages is lost.

In our tests, which compared throughput in kilobytes per second for 1K, 10K, and 100K-sized messages to a queue destination using AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE mode, we found that non-persistent messaging was about 50% faster for 1K messages, about 20% faster for 10K messages, and about 5% faster for 100K messages. The size of the message affected performance significantly for both persistent and non-persistent messages. 100k messages are about 10 times faster than 10K, and 10K messages are about 5 times faster than 1K.

Message Body Type

JMS supports five message body types, shown below roughly in the order of complexity:

• Bytes: Contains a set of bytes in a format determined by the application

• Text: Is a simple java.lang.String

• Stream: Contains a stream of Java primitive values

• Map: Contains a set of name-and-value pairs

• Object: Contains a Java serialized object

While, in general, the message type is dictated by the needs of an application, the more complicated types (map and object) carry a performance cost — the expense of serializing and deserializing the data. The performance cost depends on how simple or how complicated the data is.