deltalounge

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

Average response time

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

With 90% and max response time

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

Turn off payload validation

Response time

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.

Whether or not your Oracle Advanced Queue (AQ) will enqueue and dequeue messages can be determined with a simple query:

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SELECT name
,      queue_table
,      enqueue_enabled
,      dequeue_enabled
,      max_retries
,      retry_delay
FROM   user_queues
;

The query example is based on user_queues and in that case it has to be performed as the owner of the queue. The result wil be something like:

AQ enqueu dequeue

Async queue

One of our customers asked me exactly this question. They have an  Oracle ESB and it seemed that it could not handle all incoming requests. With the queues being a decoupling point between the incoming requests and the related transactions to the back office systems, its size can be an indication of just how busy the system is.

As I couldn’t find the answer using the Oracle Enterprise Manager Oracle Enterprise Manager and its MBeans, I started to look on the web for a tool. The tool I found and started to use was HermesJMS. This helps you interact with JMS providers making it easy to browse or search queues and topics, copy messages around and delete them.

HermesJMS screenshot

The HermesJMS requires Java 1.6. It has a clear installation guide installation guide and it is tested for multiple JMS providers. Besides the guide we needed for the Oracle AS there is also another blog describing the install and use of HermesJMS.

Using HermesJMS we were able to answer this customers question.