Re: [xmlblaster] xmlBlaster performance issues

[Nicholas Piegdon <piegdon at soartech.com>]

Marcel,

Thanks for your feedback.  We have tried most of your suggestions.  We 
saw some improvement.

However, I think I mis-characterized our throughput before.  I mentioned 
the LoadTestSub test and a figure near 300 mps.  Those 300 mps were 
using your packaged test with Java client, running both the client and 
server on the same machine in two different terminals.

Our *actual* measured throughput in practice between all of our 
applications can rarely exceed about 30 mps.  More than that though, in 
a test where we had two simple clients (a "sender" and "receiver", both 
written using the C API), we maxed out at 30 mps at first -- but over 
time, the server slowed down.  Over just a few thousand messages (2 or 3 
minutes) it ran down to only 7-10 mps.  We could completely disconnect 
and shut down both clients, but after a reconnect (without restarting 
the server) the same (ever-slowing-down) rate continued.  This was also 
after we uncommented the 7 lines in the properties file, so 
theoretically nothing should be persistent.

It was this "slowing down over time" behavior that has really been 
causing us problems.  (I was so busy describing our environment last 
time and trying to enumerate all our issues that I let that one slip by. 
:) )  It appears to be on the sending side of the C client.  In 
particular, "Publish" has always seemed like it should be a non-blocking 
call, so in our main C app we didn't take any special precautions (such 
as a message dispatch thread), and just called our send routines 
wherever we needed to in our main program loop.  Over the lifetime of 
the application though, the rest of our interface begins to slow to a 
crawl.  We can alleviate this with something like a dispatch thread, but 
that just means we'd be pushing the problem somewhere else where a queue 
would just be getting backed up.

Does any of this "slowing down" behavior sound familiar to you?

Thanks again.

--
Nicholas Piegdon
Soar Technology
piegdon at soartech.com