Oracle ESB performance enhancements

PeterPaul — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:41:09 +0000

Because the growth in the number of messages that one of our customers is receiving on it’s Oracle ESB, they were looking into how to enhance it’s performance. Oracle came up with the following clues:

Upgrade SOA Suite to a higher patch level
Reduce logging (including instance tracking in ESB)
Increase the number of listeners in ESB on Queues
Turn off payload validation

In order to see what these could do for them we did some loadtesting. The upgrade to a higher patch level of SOA Suite was needed at least to get the ESB working correctly with the configured number of listeners. However because of some issues running Oracle Universal Installer there wasn’t any time left to verify that the patch resulted in increased performance.
For functional and application management reasons turning of logging was not considered an option at this stage.

Increase the number of listeners in ESB on Queues

set ESB listeners in console

For each ESB System the number of listeners can be configured. These listeners are used to read from JMS topics. If there is only one listener (which is the default) message are read from the JMS Topic one at a time. The first screenshot shows where to set the number of listereners using the ESB Console.

Average response time

To determine the optimum number of listeners for the specific ESB, OS, hardware combination we did some loadtesting. The results for the average response time are shown in the next screenshot.

As expected the respons time increases at a certain point when the number of listeners is raised.

With 90% and max response time

“Time out” messages are never created by averages. While this first graph looks great and is very convincing, we are even more interested in the 90% and maximum respons times. A chart for these statistics has been included as well. Analyzing this graph one can conclude that this has an even stronger support to set the number of listeners to an appropriate level.

From this experiments it can be concluded that the response time can significantly be reduced by setting the number of listeners of an ESB system to the appropriate level. The maximum respons time has can be decreased by over 50%. This has a significant impact on the availability of the services exposed using the ESB.

Turn off payload validation

Another idea to enhance the performance is to turn off payload validation. Needless to say that this also has functional aspect. In most cases the validation that is performed here has some kind of business (related goal), like data quality. To switch it off, has impact, and the validation has te be migrated to some place else in the software.

Response time

The performance results can be dramatic. In a positive way! As is shown in the figure on the right, the respons time can be reduced to a fifth of the original. This goes for both the average and the maximum respons times.

If you can change your service so payload validation at this point is no longer required, this is a great step in enhancing the Oracle ESB’s performance.

deltalounge » performance

Oracle ESB performance enhancements

Increase the number of listeners in ESB on Queues

Turn off payload validation