Hello,

We want to build an Enteprise Service Bus on the webMethods6.1 platform, and now we are evaluating how to log the transactions.
If there are 100,000 transactions a day, will there be performance issue to process all of them through TN? Here is our hardware environments of the IS servers and DB servers.
IS Server:
Model: ia64 hp server rx1620
CPU: 1.6 G Hz
Memory: 8GB
OS:HP-UX 11i Version 2)
DB Server:
Model: DL 380
CPU: 2.4 G Hz
Memory: 4GB
OS: Red Hat Linux 3.2.3-20
DB: Oracle 9i
Net Work:
Normal Office 100MB Net Work

It would likely be a problem for a single TN instance. It depends, of course, on the size of the transactions and how much work effort TN (or TN-called services/models) will have to perform. Also, if you only need to log activity, and not content, TN will perform much faster. By default, all documents are logged for content and activity.

You can cluster multiple IS and TN with a front-end load balancer and achieve some hortizontal scalability - but that will likely require more hardware.

As you are starting up to build on IS6.1 (end of support is by Dec31st 2007) why dont you consider to build the ESB architecture on wMIS/TN6.5,Fabric7.0(BAM/BPM) which is already out there…builted more robust for handling more transactions thorughput,business process monitoring (MWS) etc…

HTH,
RMG

Thanks a lot for response so quickly.
We may need to log the content too, as we need to reprocess the failed transactions. By the way, is the JDBC Adapter performed much worse than the TN? Because we are aslo considering to log the activity and content to customized tables and use the JDBC Adapter services to access these tables.

The answer is… it depends.

Assuming an even interarrival time (transactions arrive evenly throughout the day), then IS/TN would need to process roughly 4,167 transactions per hour or 69.44 transactions per second.

According to the WM Technical Note “Benchmark report for webMethods Integration Server 6.5 on an HP Integrity server running HP-UX” available on Advantage, IS 6.5 running on a 4-way HP Integrity rx4640 server running HP-UX 11i v2 can process 5,482 transactions per second when running a simple No-Op Java service and 51 transactions per second when parsing a 100K XML file. Throughput drops to just 4 transactions per second when parsing a 1MB XML file.

These benchmark tests were conducted for IS 6.5 and did not use TN. The bottom line, is that your performance will depend on many, many factors mostly including number of documents per unit of time, size of the documents and the work that must be performed on each. Of course, CPU, memory, network and disk I/O performance also impact the overall throughput.

The HP benchmark report is available on Advantage in the Best Practices → Product Technical Notes section.

HTH,

Mark

Thank you very much,
It must be very useful for us to do the desion of choosing TN or not. And which is better or your preferred way to log the transaction activity and content? With TN, or Customized DB, or File, or any other way?

You probably shouldn’t build anything new using 6.1. The development support for 6.1 ends at the end of the year. You should start with at least version 6.5.

I would encourage you to not build a production infrastructure with just one server for each component. If for nothing else, multiple servers are needed to provide a fail-over facility.

As others have pointed out, you’ll likely need multiple servers to handle the load you describe.

I’d suggest using TN to log activity and content. I’d also recommend doing DB tuning of the TN schema/tables to create indexes that will speed operation.

These are not directly comparable. TN is at a higher level conceptually. It uses JDBC connections to do its work to store info to its tables.

So the question is, can you write facilities (FLOW and Java services) that use JDBC adapter connections that are more efficient than TN?

Thank you all for your advice.
And now,we are studying how to upgrade the 6.1 environment to 6.5 in a smooth way. Because we have many processes running on the production 6.1 environment now, so we must to do it carefully. So anyone has advice about it or share the upgrade experience with us? Thanks again.

Please look in the “Product Migration and Upgrades” section covers it and also Advantage site has the IS6.1 to 6.5 migration/upgrade documentation userguides,recommendations as well…this might helps you move up with migration pre-requisites/configs/procedures etc…

HTH,
RMG

Thank you RMG,
We are studying these documents and doing some test on our test environment. Thank you for all your advices, and they helped us a lot.