Tuning Message Bus performance in Servicemix

Posted by dave
on May 21, 2008 @ 10:21 PM

How fast you can send messages through ServiceMix is highly dependent on how the embedded ActiveMQ broker within ServiceMix is configured. This is because the ServiceMix NMR uses ActiveMQ as its messaging engine, so choosing the correct connection factories and persistenceAdapter can give you easy gains in performance.

AMQ Message Store

In ActiveMQ 5.0, a new high performance journaling persistence adapter was introduced called the AMQ Message Store.

To enable it, edit /conf/activemq.xml and modify the xbean config, adding the amq:persistenceAdapter element.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

 <amq:persistenceAdapter>
         <!-- Goodbye journaledJDBC --> 
         <!--amq:journaledJDBC journalLogFiles="5" dataDirectory="./data/amq"/ -->

         <!-- Hello AMQ Message Store -->
         <amq:amqPersistenceAdapter directory="file://./data/amq"/>

 </amq:persistenceAdapter>

And by the numbers ..

Example Flow: Jms consumer -> JMS provider(w/Marshaller) -> EIP pipeline -> Bean -> JMS Provider MessageCount: 10000 

   With JournaledJDBC:

   [java] Overall time: 137701 ms
   [java] Messages per sec: 7.262111386264443
   [java] 
   [java] Time: 139.603
   [java]
   [java] OK (1 test)
   With AMQ Message Store:

   [java] Overall time: 20511 ms
   [java] Messages per sec: 48.75432694651651
   [java]
   [java] Time: 23.556
   [java]
   [java] OK (1 test)

Two additional steps:

1) The current version of Servicemix trunk is using 4.1.1 of ActiveMQ, so if you want to build a ServiceMix distribution that contains ActiveMQ 5, you need to edit /trunk/pom.xml: 

1
2
3

/trunk/pom.xml
-        <activemq-version>4.1.1</activemq-version>
+        <activemq-version>5.1.0</activemq-version>

2) Once the activemq-version is updated, the ra namespace in jndi.xml needs to be updated too - as this changed between AMQ versions. 

/distributions/apache-servicemix/src/main/release/conf/jndi.xml
-       xmlns:amqra="http://activemq.org/ra/1.0"
+       xmlns:amqra="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/ra"

If your using Fuse ESB, it has a 5.x version of the Fuse Message Broker included, so the XML configuration change should be all thats required.