ActiveMQ 5.2 versus Sonic MQ 7.6

[Jared Dunne <ja...@gmail.com>]

Since joining this mailing list (and subsequently snooping around in
JIRA) during my evaluation of ActiveMQ 5.2, I've seen a lot of
concerning messages about both new and known issues around stability
and reliability in ActiveMQ.  Namely, I'm concerned about broker
downtime/halts, out of memory, failover/HA issues, and filehandle
leaks.  My initial reaction was of disappointment, however now I'm
wondering if commercial vendors (SonicMQ specifially) might have just
as many known/new issues, but it's just that ActiveMQ's dirty laundry
is more transparently aired in public view due to being an open source
community based project.

I would be curious to hear ActiveMQ (and moreover FUSE) developers'
opinions on how they see ActiveMQ's stability and reliability to
commercial vendors, especially Sonic MQ 6.x or 7.x.

I'm mostly interested in comparing the community version to Sonic
brokers, but I would be curious where FUSE releases might fit in that
spectrum too.  Also, as a side, can someone explain why there is FUSE
5.3.0.0 if ActiveMQ 5.3 is not yet released?  Additionally jsut more
understanding what value-add FUSE brings to the releases themselves
(aside from support, etc) and what the relationship between the FUSE
and community codelines are would be useful.

Jared-

Re: ActiveMQ 5.2 versus Sonic MQ 7.6

[Andreas Gies <ag...@progress.com>]

Hi Jared,

I am with PROGRESS now for 8 years and have spent 7 as consultant /  
architect
with Sonic and the last year intensively with ActiveMQ.

I will not go as far as to say that SonicMQ is bug free and wouldn't  
do that for ActiveMQ either.
This having said, my impression is that ActiveMQ and SonicMQ have  
different histories.

Sonic was concerned with enterprise features since the very beginning  
and has evolved over the last 10
years or so. Despite it's age it has added features like fault  
tolerance late in its life. I think this is due to
the fact that as a commercial product it must take version  
compatibility very seriously and introducing
a feature like fault tolerance is important, but not easy to achieve  
while keeping that compatibility.
Software vendors like PROGRESS for Sonic do have a test bed (in the  
case of Sonic a quite sophisticated
lab) that is constantly used for testing large scale deployments (in  
case of Sonic a couple of thousand
messaging nodes).

This having said, the open source community is different. For one  
thing all bugs are out in the open.
That is a good thing. You can go out and find out if you are the only  
person in the world not being able to
use a certain feature ;). Software vendors really hate publishing  
their bugs as this is bad PR. I have never
seen a sales slides for Sonic mentioning any bug at all... So I would  
agree, that it is a different kind of
visibility there.

This having said, the tests for ActiveMQ as such are more or less  
around JUnit tests and targeted at
automatic execution within a continuos build environment. This kind of  
implies that distributed tests
are hard to achieve. Companies like PROGRESS with the FUSE version of  
the Apache release
kind of jump into that gap. We reuse the lab facilities to do more  
sophisticated testing and as such harden
ActiveMQ for large deployments.

As you may have seen in the news PROGRESS has purchased IONA (the guys  
originally behind FUSE)
in September 2008, so reusing the PROGRESS labs for Open Source  
testing is not quite complete,
but it's getting better day by day ;)

Please note that these lines are my personal view on it and don't  
express official Apache or PROGRESS
statements.


Best regards
Andreas


On Apr 7, 2009, at 1:52 AM, Jared Dunne wrote:

> messages

---
Mit freundlichen Grüssen - Kind Regards
Andreas Gies
Principal Consultant
Open Source Center of Competence

Progress Software GmbH
Agrippinawerft 26
50678 Köln

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