Java Message Service

Chapter 7. Deployment Considerations

An enterprise application’s performance, scalability, and reliability should be among the foremost concerns in a real deployment environment. The underlying messaging middleware is critical to that environment.

Performance, Scalability, and Reliability

Every JMS vendor claims to be the fastest in the marketplace. Some claim to be fast and scalable to thousands of clients. It is hard to take any one vendor’s word for having the fastest and most scalable product. Different application architectures have different demands. The industry has no accepted messaging benchmark. Thus, the proof of any vendor’s claims lies in your own testing and measurement.

Performance and scalability are terms commonly used together, but they are not interchangeable. Performance refers to the speed at which the JMS provider can process a message through the system from the producer to the consumer. Scalability refers to the number of concurrently connected clients that a JMS provider can support. When used together, the terms refer to the effective rate at which a JMS provider can concurrently process a large volume of messages on behalf of a large number of simultaneously connected producers and consumers. The distinction between performance and scalability, as well as the implications of what it means to combine them, is very important, as you will soon see. A simple test using one or two clients will differ drastically from a test using hundreds or thousands of clients. ...