An Empirical Study on the Performance of ESB Applications

ESB as the code component of SOA implementation has a much higher impact on the whole system performance. This study is to zoom into investigations on ESB applications under SOA architect, evaluate the performance for different ESB applications under different SOAP/XML message routing tasks, to gain an understanding of the factors that influence the performance of SOAP/XML message routing tasks in ESB applications. Comparing with the existing ESB performance evaluations, the federated ESB evaluations, as well as performance factors comparison are the main contributions of this study. Both of the single ESB experiments and federated ESB experiments had been conducted. Four ESBs, Tibco, BizTalk, Fuse, and Mule, were tested. Three tasks were used in the single ESB experiments. Sixteen test cases were involved in the federated ESB experiments; the same task was used for all the sixteen test cases. The single ESB experiment results showed that Mule ESB applications had the best performance and Fuse ESB applications had the lowest performance. The federated experiment results showed three good performance cases with Mule ESB involved, which is consistent with the single ESB experiment results. The federated experiment results also suggested that the combination of the two good performance single ESBs are not necessary to result in good performance ESB applications. Overall, Response Time could be the factor that has the most indication of ESB performance. In the future, not only more ESB applications but also more test cases could be included for the federated ESB experiments. Further statistical analysis and result verification would bring a more comprehensive understanding of ESB performance.