Axis performance reading socket input stream

["Fernandez Martinez, Alejandro" <a....@ibermatica.com>]

Hi folks,

I have been making some performance tests for Axis, using a local and a
remote machine as SOAP server: just sending a small SOAP message a number of
times. I can give you the specifics if you want; for the moment, suffice to
say that Axis was making about 3 requests/second over a local 100 MBit
ethernet. Quite insufficient for any real-world application.

For comparison, I have also load-tested GLUE from The Mind Electric. I was
getting between 100 and 500 req/s with the same setup.

After looking for the bottleneck, the class org.apache.axis.SOAPPart seems
to be the culprit. Specificially, this snippet from SOAPPart.getAsBytes():
            // Assumes we don't need a content length
            try {
                InputStream  inp = null; 
                byte[]  buf = null;
                try{
                    inp = (InputStream) currentMessage ;
                    ByteArrayOutputStream  baos = new
ByteArrayOutputStream();
                    buf = new byte[4096];
                    int len ;
                    while ( (len = inp.read(buf,0,4096)) != -1 )
                        baos.write( buf, 0, len );
                    buf = baos.toByteArray();
                }finally{    
                  if(inp != null && 
                    currentMessage instanceof
org.apache.axis.transport.http.SocketInputStream )    
                    inp.close(); 
                }  
                setCurrentForm( buf, FORM_BYTES );
                log.debug("Exit: SOAPPart::getAsBytes");
                return (byte[])currentMessage;
            }
            catch( Exception e ) {
                log.error(Messages.getMessage("exception00"), e);
            }

It seems that this was stalling for a long time (from zero to 300 ms). A
quick hack resulted in much better performance: now I'm getting from 10 to
100 requests/second.

            try
            {
                int available = inputStream.available();
                // only read available bytes
                buf = new byte[available];
                inputStream.read(buf);
            }
            catch (IOException e)
            {
                log.error(Messages.getMessage("exception00"), e);
            }

It might have some problems though:
	- It works OK for HTTP transport, but it might not be flexible
enough for other protocols,
	- and for big messages it might not work at all.
It would probably better to read until available is 0 or -1, so that there
is no network stalling.

I wonder if this issue has come up before, and if you would be interested in
a patch for this.

Un saludo,

Alex Fernández.

Re: Axis performance reading socket input stream

[Davanum Srinivas <di...@yahoo.com>]

Alex,

Can you please zip and send the whole test case? (add it to bugzilla? -
http://ws.apache.org/axis/bugs.html)

Thanks,
dims

--- "Fernandez Martinez, Alejandro" <a....@ibermatica.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I have been making some performance tests for Axis, using a local and a
> remote machine as SOAP server: just sending a small SOAP message a number of
> times. I can give you the specifics if you want; for the moment, suffice to
> say that Axis was making about 3 requests/second over a local 100 MBit
> ethernet. Quite insufficient for any real-world application.
> 
> For comparison, I have also load-tested GLUE from The Mind Electric. I was
> getting between 100 and 500 req/s with the same setup.
> 
> After looking for the bottleneck, the class org.apache.axis.SOAPPart seems
> to be the culprit. Specificially, this snippet from SOAPPart.getAsBytes():
>             // Assumes we don't need a content length
>             try {
>                 InputStream  inp = null; 
>                 byte[]  buf = null;
>                 try{
>                     inp = (InputStream) currentMessage ;
>                     ByteArrayOutputStream  baos = new
> ByteArrayOutputStream();
>                     buf = new byte[4096];
>                     int len ;
>                     while ( (len = inp.read(buf,0,4096)) != -1 )
>                         baos.write( buf, 0, len );
>                     buf = baos.toByteArray();
>                 }finally{    
>                   if(inp != null && 
>                     currentMessage instanceof
> org.apache.axis.transport.http.SocketInputStream )    
>                     inp.close(); 
>                 }  
>                 setCurrentForm( buf, FORM_BYTES );
>                 log.debug("Exit: SOAPPart::getAsBytes");
>                 return (byte[])currentMessage;
>             }
>             catch( Exception e ) {
>                 log.error(Messages.getMessage("exception00"), e);
>             }
> 
> It seems that this was stalling for a long time (from zero to 300 ms). A
> quick hack resulted in much better performance: now I'm getting from 10 to
> 100 requests/second.
> 
>             try
>             {
>                 int available = inputStream.available();
>                 // only read available bytes
>                 buf = new byte[available];
>                 inputStream.read(buf);
>             }
>             catch (IOException e)
>             {
>                 log.error(Messages.getMessage("exception00"), e);
>             }
> 
> It might have some problems though:
> 	- It works OK for HTTP transport, but it might not be flexible
> enough for other protocols,
> 	- and for big messages it might not work at all.
> It would probably better to read until available is 0 or -1, so that there
> is no network stalling.
> 
> I wonder if this issue has come up before, and if you would be interested in
> a patch for this.
> 
> Un saludo,
> 
> Alex Fern�ndez.
> 


=====
Davanum Srinivas - http://webservices.apache.org/~dims/