Performance Test on TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks Subprocess Calls

One of our clients had asked us about the difference in performance between a TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks process that uses a subprocess call and one that does not. In other words, one TIBCO process called a subprocess to perform a certain functionality, whereas the other process had the functionality embedded in itself. The functionality in question was a simple JMS Queue Sender activity that sends a JMS queue message to the JMS server. The client was concerned that there may be a large enough performance difference between these two processes to discourage the use of subprocess calls on any process where performance is critical.

The TIBCO Certified Professionals in our company set out to find out the difference in performance between these two processes. We endeavored to answer the following question: how much of a performance cost does a subprocess call incur in TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks?

We set up one process that had the functionality embedded in it:

We setup another process with the same exact functionality being called as a subprocess:

We then called these processes individually 10,000 times each using the following loop from a caller process:

The time it took to for each process to execute 10,000 times was noted. The test was repeated 10 times for each process.

Here are the results:

To execute 10,000 times, the process that had the functionality embedded in it took 1473.5 milliseconds. On the other hand, to execute 10,000 times, the process that called the functionality as a subprocess took 1780.0 milliseconds. The difference is 306.5 milliseconds. This may seem like a large difference at first, but remember that this is for 10,000 executions. For just one execution, the difference is only 0.03065 milliseconds (306.5 / 10000).

So, surely, executing an embedded functionality is always going to be faster because there is no need to call another process to perform the functionality. Notice, however, that the difference is extremely small. The question a TIBCO architect must ask is, “Is the difference of less than 1 millisecond per execution large enough to warrant giving up the advantages of subprocesses?” One must look at the performance requirements and Service-Level Agreements (SLA) in order to properly answer this question.

The processes were deployed into a desktop computer with an Intel dual core 3 GHz CPU and 2 GB of RAM.

To learn more about this performance test, or to inquire how we can help with your TIBCO projects, feel free to contact us anytime. Please kindly leave a comment, and tell us about your own experiences in performance tuning with TIBCO Software products.

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