Throughput Performance of the ActiveMQ JMS Server

Communication among distributed software components according to the publish/subscribe principle is facilitated by the Java messaging service (JMS). JMS can be used as a message routing platform if the subscribers install filter rules on the JMS server. However, it is not clear whether its message throughput is sufficient to support large-scale systems. In this paper, we investigate the capacity of the high performance JMS server implementation ActiveMQ. In contrast to other studies, we focus on the message throughput in the presence of filters and show that filtering reduces the performance significantly. We present a model for the message processing time at the server and validate it by measurements. This model takes the number of installed filters and the replication grade of the messages into account and predicts the overall message throughput for specific application scenarios.