Startup performance

One of the things I've done recently was to benchmark how quickly Infinispan starts up.  Specifically looking at LOCAL mode (where you don't have the delays of opening sockets and discovery protocols you see in clustered mode), I wrote up a very simple test to start up 2000 caches in a loop, using the same cache manager.

This is a pretty valid use case, since when used as a non-clustered 2nd level cache in Hibernate, a separate cache instance is created per entity type, and in the past this has become somewhat of a bottleneck.

In this test, I compared Infinispan 5.0.1.Final, 5.1.0.CR1 and 5.1.0.CR2.  5.1.0 is significantly quicker, but I used this test (and subsequent profiling) to commit a couple of interesting changes in 5.1.0.CR2, which has improved things even more - both in terms of CPU performance as well as memory footprint.

Essentially, 5.1.0.CR1 made use of Jandex to perform annotation scanning of internal components at build-time, to prevent expensive reflection calls to determine component dependencies and lifecycle at runtime.  5.1.0.CR2 takes this concept a step further - now we don't just cache annotation lookups at build-time, but entire dependency graphs.  And determining and ordering of lifecycle methods are done at build-time too, again making startup times significantly quicker while offering a much tighter memory footprint.

Enough talk.  Here is the test used, and here are the performance numbers, as per my laptop, a 2010 MacBook Pro with an i5 CPU.


Multiverse:InfinispanStartupBenchmark manik [master]$ ./bench.sh 
---- Starting benchmark ---


  Please standby ... 


Using Infinispan 5.0.1.FINAL (JMX enabled? false) 
   Created 2000 caches in 10.9 seconds and consumed 172.32 Mb of memory.


Using Infinispan 5.0.1.FINAL (JMX enabled? true) 
   Created 2000 caches in 56.18 seconds and consumed 315.21 Mb of memory.


Using Infinispan 5.1.0.CR1 (JMX enabled? false) 
   Created 2000 caches in 7.13 seconds and consumed 157.5 Mb of memory.


Using Infinispan 5.1.0.CR1 (JMX enabled? true) 
   Created 2000 caches in 34.9 seconds and consumed 243.33 Mb of memory.


Using Infinispan 5.1.0.CR2(JMX enabled? false) 
   Created 2000 caches in 3.18 seconds and consumed 142.2 Mb of memory.


Using Infinispan 5.1.0.CR2(JMX enabled? true) 
   Created 2000 caches in 17.62 seconds and consumed 176.13 Mb of memory.


A whopping 3.5 times faster, and significantly more memory-efficient especially when enabling JMX reporting.  :-)


Enjoy!
Manik

Infinispan 5.1.0.CR2 is out in time for Xmas!

Infinispan 'Brahma' 5.1.0.CR2 is out now with a load of fixes and a few internal changes such the move to a StaX based XML parser as opposed to relying on JAXB which did not get in for CR1. The new parser is a lot faster and has less overhead and does not require any changes from a user perspective.

We've also worked on improving startup time by indexing annotation metadata at build time and reading it at runtime. From a Infinispan user perspective, there's been some changes to how Infinispan is extended, in particular related to custom command implementations, where we know use JDK's ServiceLoader to load them.

As per usual, downloads are in the usual place, use the forums to provide feedback and report any issues.

Cheers, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all the Infinispan community! :)
Galder

First Infinispan 5.1.0 'Brahma' candidate release is out!

We're getting close to releasing Infinispan 5.1 'Brahma', and today I have the pleasure of announcing the Infinispan 5.1.0.CR1, our first release candidate. So, what's in it?

• Ahead of future eventual consistency support, Infinispan now supports versioned cache entries which means that existing write skew checks on REPEATABLE_READ caches can be done more accurately.
• Support for CDI injection of remote caches! Thanks to excellent work of community contributor Kevin Pollet, you can now inject remote caches as well as embedded caches using CDI. Detailed documentation on how to use is available here. In the mean time, checkout the CDI integration module in the Infinispan source code for examples.

Finally, we've introduced considerable new functionality in the previous Infinispan 5.1 alpha/beta releases, and so this first release candidate contains some important fixes for the newly introduced functionality, so if you're using any previous alpha/beta releases, please upgrade asap and provide us some feedback!

Cheers,

Galder

Infinispan coming to the French Alps!

Remember that on the 15th of December, I'll be speaking at the Alpes JUG in Grenoble about Infinispan. This is a great opportunity for anyone interested in topics such as data caching and data grids to come and learn about Infinispan and its ecosystem, including Hibernate second level cache, Hibernate OGM...etc.

Looking forward to meeting Emannuel and the rest of the Alpes JUG gang :)

Cheers,
Galder