JBoss has published the results of messaging throughput benchmarks against the leading enterprise messaging servers on the market that implement the Java Message Service (JMS) API. In these results HornetQ demonstrates superior performance compared to the other products.
The benchmarks cover some common messaging use cases, including both lightweight publish/subscribe messaging and persistent point-to-point messaging. Default configuration for each system was used unless the vendor specifically recommended particular tunings for performance in their documentation, or the vendor's default configuration settings did not provide JMS specification compliance.
Since the license of some proprietary messaging systems prohibits from attributing benchmark results to them, the results for those systems were published anonymously. Since there are several proprietary systems in the results it is not possible to infer which results belong to which of the proprietary systems. The following versions of the non-anonymised messaging systems were used in the measurements.
- HornetQ 2.1.1 final
- ActiveMQ 5.3.2 GA
- SwiftMQ 7.6
- OpenMQ 4.4
The benchmark results [PDF] showed that HornetQ had better performance than the other solutions, in a variety of scenarios:
For lightweight publish / subscribe messaging with 12 byte messages, there was a very wide range of results with HornetQ as the clear leader. For publish/subscribe messaging with larger 1 kiB messages, several systems appeared to saturate the 1 Gib/s network becoming I/O bound and gave similar results around the 100k messages/sec mark. Other systems could not saturate the network. It would be interesting to see how much higher results would go with a faster 10 Gib/s network. For persistent messaging, there was also a wide range of results again with HornetQ as the performance leader.
It is worth noting that earlier this year, HornetQ had proven faster than ActiveMQ in peer reviewed benchmark, mainly because of its choice to implement a highly tuned journal that uses AIO when running on Linux.
You can find more information on Messaging and HornetQ, right here on InfoQ!