Testing Update: ESB Performance

That's right. We love you so much that we're testing the performance of ESB products so you don't have to.The things we do to make your lives easier... Each of the ESB products I'm testing is required to build out our pre-defined scenario which includes a number of connections to external systems, including OpenJMS.

After a first attempt at performance testing, OpenJMS went Out. The. Window. OpenJMS couldn't handle more than one connection from a machine and dragged performance down so much it was almost - ALMOST - funny.

So it's out. Then the Exchange server started having a cow. So we substituted our Spirent Reflector to simulate an e-mail server. Ahhh...the mail server is so much faster when it isn't actually trying to do anything I'm thinking that using the Reflector as our corporate mail server would cut down on the amount of SPAM I get every day, but then again it would cut out all e-mail so maybe that isn't such a good idea...

After more than a day of playing around with all the variables I finally have a scenario configured in two different products that can be tested without any of the external systems causing bottlenecks.

So I did.Let's just say that if you've tried to test an ESB or an EAI system for scalability you know how painful it can be, and this test is no exception. Between configuring the Spirent Avalanche to play nice with each of the web services endpoints that kick off the process and making certain that all the other pieces of the test are running correctly...well, it's been a long day. I brought both products to their proverbial knees within a matter of minutes, then backed off and inched up the scale until I broke them again, looking for each product's breaking point and the implications of concurrent processes on latency and CPU utilization.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I am a speed demon and the last time I obeyed the speed limit while driving was ... well ... when I tested for my license. Don't ask when that was, I'm not saying.

Just getting this far has been worth it, though, as there's some interesting performance trends in the data that will be cool to pull together for you to peruse in the near future.