Axis2 performance when using Rampart is very poor. I published some
figures on this a few months ago in
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jws6/index.html and
have now performed some tests comparing Axis2/Rampart performance with
Metro. I was surprised to see that Metro's performance is much better
than Axis2/Rampart for WS-Security, so I tried digging into this a bit.
Using log4j.logger.org.apache.rampart.TIME=DEBUG gives an assortment of
times which seem to span all the Rampart handling. The interesting thing
is that when I add up all the time results from the output, the total is
less than half of the time actually taken for the test. Here's a summary
for a test using signatures in both directions (with client and server
running on the same system and single-threaded processing), by way of
example:
-------------------------
/Total time for 100 message exchanges: 47516
Client
Inbound processHeader by WSSecurityEngine 4895, DOOM conversion 7439,
PolicyBasedResultsValidattor 1446; total inbound 13780
Outbound Signature took 1645
Server
Inbound processHeader by WSSecurityEngine 817, DOOM conversion 83,
PolicyBasedResultsValidattor 708; total inbound 1608
Outbound Signature took 5221
Total of all reported times: 22254
/
-------------------------
These are reasonable figures for the WS-Security processing (and
comparable to the Metro total times), though the DOOM conversion step is
a lot of overhead for the "convenience" of working with AXIOM. AFAIKS
the TIME=DEBUG timing reports should include all the actual security
processing - so where's the rest of overhead coming from?
I'm suspecting there's more going on with AXIOM conversions and such as
part of the inbound and outbound processing, though it's hard to imagine
that these conversions could be taking up as much time as the actual
signature processing. Does anyone have any ideas on this?
- Dennis
