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WebSphere traditional and WebSphere Liberty Throughput performance on the New IBM z16 Platform

By Mike Andrasak posted Mon July 11, 2022 10:29 AM

  
IBM recently announced the new z16 Mainframe platform. This new platform offers several functional enhancements such as AI processors and quantum-safety along with improved performance. All of which you can read about here. In this blog post we will look at how both WebSphere traditional and WebSphere Liberty throughput performance is enhanced on this new server when running on the z/OS platform.

Throughput z16 vs z15 WebSphere traditional
The continuous performance improvements of WebSphere traditional over the years can be seen in the chart below.
The throughput improvement from z15 to z16 is approximately 19% when comparing these machines. The WebSphere level and Java level on each machine is the vintage available at announce time for each, therefore some of this improvement can be attributed to newer software levels.

The continuous improvement in throughput for WebSphere traditional servers on z/OS is once again demonstrated in the above chart. WebSphere traditional version 9.0.5.10 running on Java 8 SR7 on z16 is providing 21 times the throughput compared to WAS 6.1 and Java 5 running on a z9.


Throughput z16 vs z15 Liberty on z/OS
In the chart below we can see that there is 12% improvement in the throughput performance of the z16 vs z15 when running a non-SSL workload.


With SSL enabled however there is a more interesting story. In the chart on the left below we see the throughput with SSL caching disabled. This would be indicative of the performance improvement that could be seen by a user if no session reuse were available. Here the hardware enhancements provided with the z16 show a 45 to 50 percent throughput improvement.

Enabling SSL caching shows a 12% to 14% improvement in throughput performance for this same application (shown in the chart to the right above).

These are opposite ends of a spectrum regarding session reuse. The amount of reuse an application is capable of can vary from application to application. If you have an application with a lot of session reuse the performance would likely fall closer to the 12 to 14% range. If your application has a low percentage of session reuse you might see throughput closer to the 45 to 50% range.

Summary
As you can see above, WebSphere traditional and WebSphere Liberty show enhanced throughput performance on the z16 servers running with z/OS. Note that the performance values derived above were with the benchmark applications daytrader3 and daytrader8. The performance of your application is unique to its design and implementation. The throughput of which may vary from what is show above.  

 
#IBMZOS
#performance
#WebSphere
#WebSphereLiberty
#WebSphere-performance
#z/OS
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