Clustering web applications on Tomcat - Part 3

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Performance

We performed a benchmarking exercise to highlight the performance characteristics of the two solutions. Our test consisted of the following simulated real world actions:

1. Log in to the application
2. Add several items to the shopping cart (The JPetStore application stores shopping cart in session)
3. Modify the quantity of the items in the shopping cart.

To obtain quantifiable results, Step 3 was repeated for 60,000 iterations and the resulting numbers of transactions per second were measured.

Results:

The following graphs show the performance test results for both the Terracotta Sessions and Tomcat Pooled Mode replication clustering solutions. To test linear scalability, the throughput results were obtained for one node in the cluster, not cluster wide.

In the above graph, Tomcat with Terracotta scales linearly as more nodes are added with a flat curve (red curve - no decrease in throughput). Tomcat with its "Pooled Mode Replication" clustering solution, on the other hand, does not scale linearly with a curve that decreases as more nodes are added (blue curve).

As a result, as is evident in the following graph, the overall system performance increases (Terracotta Sessions + Tomcat - red curve) as against decreasing (Tomcat Clustering - blue curve) when more nodes are added into the cluster.

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