The number and speed of connections between client and broker can affect the number of messages that a message service can handle as well as the speed of message delivery.
All access to the broker is by way of connections. Any limit on the number of concurrent connections can affect the number of producing or consuming clients that can concurrently use the broker.
The number of connections to a broker is generally limited by the number of threads available. Message Queue can be configured to support either a dedicated thread model or a shared thread model (see Thread Pool Management).
The dedicated thread model is very fast because each connection has dedicated threads, however the number of connections is limited by the number of threads available (one input thread and one output thread for each connection). The shared thread model places no limit on the number of connections, however there is significant overhead and throughput delays in sharing threads among a number of connections, especially when those connections are busy.
Message Queue software allows clients to communicate with the broker using various low-level transport protocols. Message Queue supports the connection services (and corresponding protocols) described in Configuring Connection Services.
The choice of protocols is based on application requirements (encrypted, accessible through a firewall), but the choice affects overall performance.
Our tests compared throughput for TCP and SSL for two cases: a high-reliability scenario (1k persistent messages sent to topic destinations with durable subscriptions and using AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE acknowledgment mode) and a high-performance scenario (1k nonpersistent messages sent to topic destinations without durable subscriptions and using DUPS_OK_ACKNOWLEDGE acknowledgment mode).
In general we found that protocol has less effect in the high-reliability case. This is probably because the persistence overhead required in the high-reliability case is a more important factor in limiting throughput than the protocol speed. Additionally:
TCP provides the fastest method to communicate with the broker.
SSL is 50 to 70 percent slower than TCP when it comes to sending and receiving messages (50 percent for persistent messages, closer to 70 percent for nonpersistent messages). Additionally, establishing the initial connection is slower with SSL (it might take several seconds) because the client and broker (or Web Server in the case of HTTPS) need to establish a private key to be used when encrypting the data for transmission. The performance drop is caused by the additional processing required to encrypt and decrypt each low-level TCP packet.
HTTP is slower than either the TCP or SSL. It uses a servlet that runs on a Web server as a proxy between the client and the broker. Performance overhead is involved in encapsulating packets in HTTP requests and in the requirement that messages go through two hops--client to servlet, servlet to broker--to reach the broker.
HTTPS is slower than HTTP because of the additional overhead required to encrypt the packet between client and servlet and between servlet and broker.