Jason Stamper's Blog

Jason,
This might seem odd, but for the most part people shouldn't care how fast a BPEL server works. Typically you only execute a couple operations at a time before you hit a blocking operation. The BPEL code should represent less than 1% of the total logic that is being executed in a system.

The high performance considerations should be at the endpoints and in any queues or intermediaries (IMHO). Most of the processing time in a BPEL schedule is related to the SOAP parsing and object assigns. This means that the company that swaps out their SOAP stack to the latest & greatest will almost always have the fastest BPEL engine.

I know the basics of how the FiveSight/Intalio engine was built - and from what I remember they were very concerned about performance. It wouldn't surprise me if they have the fastest one hands-down - I'm just not so sure how important that is.
Jeff

Thanks for the comment Jeff. I am sure you are probably right, indeed when it comes to benchmarks in the server space I rarely pay much attention, on the basis that how fast a server runs a benchmark is of less importance than how fast it runs your applications in your environment.

However with the ESB/SOA space still in its infancy, and lingering questions in some people's minds over the scalability of this approach versus more traditional MQ-type brokers, I suspect that some readers would like to see some numbers to back up the claims of many of these vendors that ESBs are ready for prime time.

While I applause Intalio for offering some numbers I also note that it looks to be their own benchmark, as there is not an industry standard benchmark yet that would enable us to compare apples with apples.

My concern about these benchmarks revolves around the definition of a process. My recollection of the Intalio product is that they view a process very differently from other vendors and radically different from what a business user may think.

So what did these 3.5 million processes do? Did they add two numbers together in 24 hours (so very slow and a cry for help) or did they process the entire number of trade matches carried out on wall street in a given day (which would be as expected).

The raw numbers stated in this way are completely meaningless.

Jon

Measuring BPEL throughput capability is only part of the story as web service orchestration may only be a small component of complex and long lived business processes which will call services other than web services and interfaces to update enterprise applications (ERP, content management and legacy applications etc).

A third party benchmark has demonstrated that TIBCO iProcess Engine can easily handle up to 30 000 concurrent users with stable CPU utilisation and it was able to execute 5.6 million transactions in an hour.

What about transactional integrity and failover capabilities to provide business continuity? TIBCO has just announced new capabilities with iProcess Suite 10.5 to ensure high availability including enhanced support for failover in a Microsoft Windows environment and support for ORACLE Real Application Cluster for Oracle 10G.

Users should look beyond vendor benchmark results to think about the bigger picture, i.e. can the process engine handle all types of business processes (complex and straight through processing), maintain transactional integrity and be easily integrated in a high availability systems architecture?

Given the world is driving towards specialisation through development of components, it is not surprising that one of the competitions of the future is "my component is faster than yours". All credit to Intalio for developing a benchmark and wanting to be compared against their competition, but it is not the real issue we are faced with.

The reality for people focused on delivering tangible results to the people benefiting from these components is much broader.

At the component level we will need to know whose component is the most reliable, the easiest to maintain and upgrade, the most secure, the easiest to configure, monitor and optimise especially in context of the process it supports.
I don't mind simplistic conversations but if we are really trying to help people make better more effective use of the emerging digital infrastructure of our society we need to stimulate a discussion that transcends just one dimension.

The second level we need to consider will be much harder for people to deal with. This level is about the performance across all the aforementioned dimensions of an end to end process that uses all these components to deliver the business result to the people I referred to earlier.

Show me a solution that understands that challenge and can provide an adequate multi-view, multi-dimensional analysis capability and I will show you who will ultimately have the real control and mindshare in the future.
I believe we will see the emergence of business service providers who are adept at combining and optimising the components to deliver exceptional and truly differentiated services that will be the true disruptive innovations of the "age of ubiquity" to quote Ken Olisa of Restoration Partners.

Here at Solutionsmtd we are all about helping people break new markets, this will be harder and harder with out effective integrated and agile processes underpinned by flexible a infrastructure and reconfigurable components.

Lets have the real discussion and move it up to the C"Business"R level

Regards

David E. Alexander
Managing Director
Solutions - Make the Difference
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