Startup performance

One of the things I’ve done recently was to benchmark how quickly Infinispan starts up. Specifically looking at LOCAL mode (where you don’t have the delays of opening sockets and discovery protocols you see in clustered mode), I wrote up a very simple test to start up 2000 caches in a loop, using the same cache manager.

This is a pretty valid use case, since when used as a non-clustered 2nd level cache in Hibernate, a separate cache instance is created per entity type, and in the past this has become somewhat of a bottleneck.

In this test, I compared Infinispan 5.0.1.Final, 5.1.0.CR1 and 5.1.0.CR2. 5.1.0 is significantly quicker, but I used this test (and subsequent profiling) to commit a couple of interesting changes in 5.1.0.CR2, which has improved things even more - both in terms of CPU performance as well as memory footprint.

Essentially, 5.1.0.CR1 made use of Jandex to perform annotation scanning of internal components at build-time, to prevent expensive reflection calls to determine component dependencies and lifecycle at runtime. 5.1.0.CR2 takes this concept a step further - now we don’t just cache annotation lookups at build-time, but entire dependency graphs. And determining and ordering of lifecycle methods are done at build-time too, again making startup times significantly quicker while offering a much tighter memory footprint.

Enough talk. Here is the test used, and here are the performance numbers, as per my laptop, a 2010 MacBook Pro with an i5 CPU.

Multiverse:InfinispanStartupBenchmark manik [master]$ ./bench.sh ---- Starting benchmark ---

Using Infinispan 5.0.1.FINAL (JMX enabled? false) Created 2000 caches in 10.9 seconds and consumed 172.32 Mb of memory.

Using Infinispan 5.0.1.FINAL (JMX enabled? true) Created 2000 caches in 56.18 seconds and consumed 315.21 Mb of memory.

Using Infinispan 5.1.0.CR1 (JMX enabled? false) Created 2000 caches in 7.13 seconds and consumed 157.5 Mb of memory.

Using Infinispan 5.1.0.CR1 (JMX enabled? true) Created 2000 caches in 34.9 seconds and consumed 243.33 Mb of memory.

Using Infinispan 5.1.0.CR2(JMX enabled? false) Created 2000 caches in 3.18 seconds and consumed 142.2 Mb of memory.

Using Infinispan 5.1.0.CR2(JMX enabled? true) Created 2000 caches in 17.62 seconds and consumed 176.13 Mb of memory.

A whopping 3.5 times faster, and significantly more memory-efficient especially when enabling JMX reporting. :-)

Enjoy! Manik

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