The Competitors

I don't normally spend much time worrying about our competitors. I figure keeping the customers happy is a better use of my time. But no set of blog posts about performance would be complete without a final showdown...

There aren't all that many standalone JTA transaction managers out there. Most function only as part of an application server and are not a viable option for embedding in other environments. Others are incomplete or largely abandoned. In my opinion there are currently only two serious challengers to JBossTS for use outside a full Java EE app server. Let's see how they do.

results in transactions per second, using quad core i7, jdk6, in-memory logging i.e. we're testing the CPU not the disk.

threads  JBossTS       Competitor A.
1         93192           9033
2        164744          20242
3        224114          22649
4        249781          21148
100      239865          19978

umm, guys, "synchronized ( Foo.class )" is really not a good idea, ok? Come on, put up a bit more of a fight please, this is no fun.

Next contender, please....

threads  JBossTS        Competitor B.
1         93192           102270
2        164744           145011
3        224114           185528
4        249781           193199
100      239865            29528

Ahh, that's more like it. Good to have a worthy opponent to keep us on our toes. Some kind of scaling problem there though. Looks like contention on the data structures used to queue transaction timeouts. Been there, done that. Feel free to browse the source code for inspiration guys :-)

Since nobody in their right mind actually runs a transaction manager with logging turned off, this is really all just a bit of fun. Well, for some of us anyhow. So where is the competitive comparison for the real world scenario?

Well, I do have the comparison numbers for all three systems with logging enabled, but I'd hesitate to describe them as competitive. You'll have to try it for yourself or you just won't believe the difference. Suffice it to say there is only one Clebert, and we've got him. Sorry guys.

Now if this had been an ease of use contest I'd be a bit more worried. Sure we have a ton of detailed and comprehensive reference documentation, but the learning curve is near vertical. Time to work on some intro level material: quick starts, config examples etc. Not as much fun as performance tuning, but probably more useful at this point.