Optimizing message flow response times

Using different solutions to improve message flow response times.

Before you start:
Read the following concept topic:

When you design a message flow, the flexibility and functional capabilities of the built-in nodes often mean that there are several ways to achieve the processing and results that you require. You might find that different solutions deliver different levels of performance and, if this is an important consideration for you, then you must take this into account when designing your message flow

Your applications can perceive performance in either of these ways:

  1. The response time indicates how quickly each message is processed by the message flow. The response time is particularly influenced by how you design your message flows. Response time is discussed in this topic.
  2. The throughput indicates how many messages of particular sizes can be processed by a message flow in a given time. The throughput is mainly affected by configuration and system resource factors, and is discussed in the topic on optimizing message flow throughput along with other domain configuration information. See Optimizing message flow throughput.

Several aspects influence message flow response times. However, as you create and modify your message flow design to arrive at the best results that meet your specific business requirements, you must also consider the eventual complexity of the message flow. The most efficient message flows are not necessarily the easiest to understand and maintain; experiment with the solutions available to arrive at the best balance for your needs.

Several factors influence message flow response times:

The number of nodes that you include in the message flow
Every node increases the amount of processing required in the broker, therefore, consider the content of the message flow carefully, including the use of subflows.

Use as few nodes as possible in a message flow; every node that you include in the message flow increases the amount of processing required in the broker. The number of nodes within a single flow has an upper limit. This limit is governed by system resources, particularly the stack size.

For more information about stack sizes, see System considerations for message flow development.

The use of persistent and transactional messages
Persistent messages are saved to disk during message flow processing. You can avoid this situation by specifying that messages either on input, output, or both, are non-persistent. If your message flow is handling only non-persistent messages, check the configuration of the nodes and the message flow itself; if your messages are non-persistent, transactional support might be unnecessary. The default configuration of some nodes enforces transactionality; if you update these properties and redeploy the message flow, response times might improve.
Message size
A larger message takes longer to process. If you can split large messages into smaller units of information, you might be able to improve the speed at which they are handled by the message flow. The following sample demonstrates how to minimize the virtual storage requirements for the message flow to improve a message flow's performance when processing potentially large messages. You can view samples only when you use the information center that is integrated with the Message Brokers Toolkit.

You can find more information about improving the performance of a message flow in this developerWorks® article on message flow performance.

Related concepts
Message flows overview
Deployment overview
System considerations for message flow development
Related tasks
Configuring WebSphere Event Broker
Optimizing message flow throughput
Designing a message flow
Using more than one input node
Creating a message flow
Defining message flow content
Editing configurable properties
Related reference
Built-in nodes
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Last updated : 2009-01-07 15:39:36

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