An Evaluation of messages-based Systems Integration with respect to Performance: A case study

Abstract

This report describes a case-study evaluation of two integration strategies with particular focus on performance. The study is motivated by integration challengers within a company we have cooperated with, and our wish to gain insight into systems integration. The goal of the study has been to evaluate the performance of two message-based system integration strategies. We have evaluated this by implementing several applications which are integrated using either Web services technologies or an integration technology provided by our cooperator. Our research questions have been as follows: Q1: Which integration solution has best performance in a publish-subscribe scenario? Q2: Which integration solution has best performance in a request-response scenario? The results show that the Web service applications has best performance when sending small messages (up to 160kB). For large messages, the applications based on the integration technology from the cooperating company perform better. he contributions of the study may be split in two. The contribution to the company is the performance evaluation of their technology. Collected data for response time and throughput, and performance models for our test applications are also contributed. For a broader context, we contribute with performance evaluation of Web services technologies. Data is collected for response time and throughput on test applications, and performance models are made. The comparisons of integrations based on Web services and MIP also serves as example of the performance of Web services versus other middleware.