Performance Testing and WSO2 Carbon

Finally we were wrapping up the Messagebox program we had created using Apache Axis2. Now comes the final point. Yes, we had to do a performance analysis using Apache Jmeter. Our Messagebox program has four operations: createMessagebox, storeMessages, takeMessages, deleteMessagebox. Being a web service, we have the axis2 archive (.aar) of our program.

We have developed a client to run our web service. Given the WSDL, wsdl2java will auto-generate the Client Stub and the Server Skeleton. Completing server skeleton with the necessary logic obviously has cost a much longer time, when compared with the writing of client code using the client stub. Now during the performance testing, we are going to use the same web service, but we will not use the client we have developed. Rather we will be using our test plan generated using JMeter, as the client to run our server. Now we need SOAP/XML-RPC Request for each operation.

This Jmeter performance analysis will be saved as a .jmx file. In the Admin Console of WSO2 WSAS (Web Services Application Server or WSO2 Application Server), we have "Add Axis2 Service" option in the left hand side panel. I uploaded our aar using that Add option. A success message appeared as expected. Then I clicked the List Menu for deployed services. There I clicked Try this service option for the MsgBoxService. I was taken to the Try the MsgBoxService service. 

WSAS has a nice GUI with textboxes to input the values. Getting the output instantly, I was walking through WSAS to see more. Found something under the monitor menu. SOAP Tracer! I configured the Configuration Status to ON. A warning says “Tracing will have a performance hit. Use with caution.” I will not overuse this functionality however. Then I went back to try the service. After trying all the four operations, I came back to the SOAP Tracer. SOAP messages for both the request and the response. Then it took me just minutes to copy-paste those SOAP messages for the four operation requests, into the respective SOAP/XML-RPC Request of Jmeter.

The conclusion of the performance analysis was not much difficult after that. Just adding a variable in place of the input value, a counter to have about 1000 users each user as a thread, timer, Loop Controller to send 10 msg for each user’s msgbox, and finally Graph results to see the performance of each operation visually.