Performance is generally a key factor in the evaluation and selection of technological solutions, and enterprise mashup platforms are no exception to the rule. Even after the solution has been selected, the question of server sizing arises again with each new project.
To illustrate why, let’s take the example of another question: “How fast does a car go?”
The speed of a car depends mainly on its intrinsic characteristics, such as its engine power, total loaded weight and aerodynamic coefficient (Cx). If we wanted to be very precise, we could factor in other parameters: the way the paint quality affects the airflow capacity around the car, the nature of the exhaust system, the fit between the tires and the terrain… Numerous criteria external to the vehicle also play a role: the type of road surface, the weather conditions, the driver’s experience, etc.
The question itself needs to be more specific: it all depends how we measure “fast”. In terms of absolute top speed? Or the time from 0 to 60 mph? Or the time over one mile, from a standing start? Or the maximum speed reached in 10 seconds? These new questions touch on factors like gear range, torque and many other parameters.
The performance of an enterprise mashup platform depends on at least as many parameters and can likewise be measured in different ways: the response time of a given sequence or transaction, the maximum number of transactions that can be run simultaneously on a given server, etc.
It is possible, however, to outline an answer, but this requires going into the details of how Convertigo executes transactions and understanding the various steps involved.
The memory consumption and simultaneous transaction processing aspects must also be considered. Once these elements are established, it is possible to size the hardware correctly and to implement the software architecture best suited to a successful Convertigo deployment.
Convertigo transactions and sequences are part of a chain of IT components that include, starting from the user: the browser, the terminal, the Internet access, the Convertigo server, the legacy applications, and the servers that host the applications.
Convertigo calls up the screens from the legacy application, in much the same way as a user might do so manually. This means that nothing needs to be redeveloped: you can access the applications as they are, and retrieve all the available business logic in the user interface (surface controls), the application (data validation, business services) and the databases (stored procedures).
C-EMS receives requests from users and activates the various legacy systems, which continue to run in the same way as before.
It acts as a kind of proxy, aggregating, filtering, converting and publishing the initial data in a modern mashup.
C-EMS is, in a very real sense, an intermediate server between the user and the legacy applications. The response time perceived by the user therefore includes the response times of the legacy applications plus the Convertigo response time, as well as the time required to serialize and carry the information to the end browser.
This intermediate layer inevitably involves an additional “overhead” time, therefore a Convertigo transaction cannot, as a rule, be faster than the original transaction in the legacy application.
NB: All of the response times mentioned below are average values observed in test or production environments, on “standard” Intel machines, i.e. a 2GHz dual core processor with 2 to 4 GB of RAM.
NB2: All of the response times used below for illustrative purposes are based on web pages of average complexity, such as for example a page of Google search results.
When Convertigo is used to access an existing Web application, the following steps are implemented:
In conclusion, cumulative Convertigo times rarely exceed 200 ms in general for one transaction, whereas the response times of the target applications are often much longer (up to several thousand milliseconds).
The Convertigo overhead is therefore generally insignificant compared with the normal response times of the applications. This remains true even under unfavorable conditions where the C-EMS response times become longer, as this is principally due to responses from target applications which themselves are more complex and/or more voluminous and therefore more time-intensive.
NB: All of the response times used below for illustrative purposes are based on legacy screens of average complexity, such as the following AS400 screen (a classic customer management system, with a data table and function-key actions)
Where Convertigo is used to access legacy applications (mainframe, AS400, Unix), the steps are basically identical. In this case, clearly, screen parsing is not based on XUL, but on analysis of the screen formats concerned (3270, 5250 and VT standards). As these formats are less complex than HTML, the parsing times are generally shorter in legacy mode than in Web mode, and are usually less than 10 ms.
For the same reasons, the response times for extraction rules are also significantly shorter.
The only step that is more complex in legacy transactions is end-of-page detection (synchronization). While the legacy screen frames always contain an end marker, this only really serves to indicate the unlocking of the keyboard, and there is no guarantee that the screen consists of just one frame. In 95% of cases, screens are limited to a single frame (CICS screens, for example), but there are situations in which a screen is made up of several frames. A detection loop is therefore required to pick up keyboard_unlock signals, to ensure that we really have reached the end of the screen.
Overall, the processing of a legacy screen is estimated to take an average of about 50 ms (compared to 200 ms for a web page).
As we have seen, a Convertigo Web transaction can take up to 200 ms on average (or 50 ms for a legacy transaction), on a standard Intel configuration, by a fairly conservative assessment. This result suggests that approximately 5 simultaneous Web transactions (or 20 legacy transactions) can be handled per second and per processor core, and therefore about 8 simultaneous Web transactions (or 34 legacy transactions) on a dual-core processor.
As the computer CPU reaches saturation point (near to 100%), the execution time for the “Start Worker Thread” step (see the Web Transaction and Legacy Transaction sections above) rapidly becomes longer and longer. This phenomenon needs to be taken into account when sizing the servers – one should avoid approaching CPU saturation.
Convertigo uses the Gecko / XUL parsing engine to analyze Web pages. This engine is developed by Mozilla and supports the analysis of most existing web pages.
It can read very complex pages, but it ramps up better in multiple-process architectures.
For the reasons set out above, Convertigo recommends deploying several medium-sized instances of C-EMS rather than one big instance.
On a standard Intel machine, it is best to deploy 3 or 4 Convertigo instances, each limited to 15 threads, in order to achieve optimal utilization of hardware resources.
NB: This deployment model, optimized from the viewpoint of thread concurrency, is not penalized by excessive memory consumption: modern operating systems allow sharing of the constant memory costs of the JVM and JRE.
The Convertigo sequencer has a very low impact on overall response time. All operations are performed in memory and involve only a few objects, even for complex sequences. Basically, the execution time of a sequence is the sum of the execution times of the transactions involved in that sequence.
NB: version 5.0.4 of Convertigo (available since June 2010) brought a significant improvement in sequencer performance by avoiding any unnecessary HTTP network calls.
To observe and analyze C-EMS performance, the Display Statistics option must be enabled in the Convertigo administration console:
With these settings, the traces provided in the Convertigo engine log files and in the XML outputs will give the response times for each step in the execution of the transactions:
Alternatively, specific traces can be written during the execution of the transactions, using log statements:
The corresponding traces generated in the log files will contain time stamps, which are useful for detailed analysis of response times from a section of a particular transaction.
The Convertigo sequencer can execute several transactions in parallel (ParallelStep). Under the right conditions – notably when the legacy application response times are long – this means that the execution time for n transactions can be limited to the longest transaction time, instead of adding together a series of execution times, as when the transactions are executed by a user.
Pooling is a way of pre-initializing connections to existing applications, by executing the login and transaction phases required to enter the application’s operational state. Once the pool has been initialized (by the “warming” phase), the next requests will make use of the already active sessions, thus avoiding the often quite significant connection times.
There are two pooling modes:
In C-EMS version 5.0, the pooling mechanism is available only for the Legacy Integrator and SQL connectors. Pooling support for the Web Integrator connector is scheduled for the end of 2010.
Enabling pooling can produce a huge improvement in the performance of legacy mashups, depending on the architecture of the original application.
C-EMS has its own integrated cache mechanism.
Each transaction or sequence can retrieve its data from the cache instead of calling the legacy application.
The cache options are configured in the transaction and sequence properties:
If the cache needs to be pre-loaded, a specific sequence will need to be developed, which will call the various target transactions in order to load the cache.
As from version 5.0, C-EMS projects can be deployed in the Convertigo Cloud. The Convertigo Cloud is based on Amazon EC2, supplemented by monitoring and load-balancing tools developed by Convertigo.
Deployment in the Cloud is done entirely transparently, requiring no Amazon EC2 competencies. Cloud deployments can be combined with conventional server deployments hosted on-premises and administered by customers.
The Convertigo Cloud offers numerous advantages for customers at every phase of a project. In particular, it makes the technology evaluation phases very straightforward.
From a production performance viewpoint, the Convertigo Cloud offers total flexibility: Convertigo administrators can rapidly allocate new resources to a project at any time. Conversely, if a project has more resources than it needs, they can again be adjusted very quickly.
Performance-wise, in comparable contexts, Cloud-based execution is similar in terms of response times to running processes on enterprise servers.
The Convertigo Cloud automatically adjusts and allocates resources in response to client needs, and in order to maximize the shared use of available Amazon resources (Convertigo load-balancing algorithms).
For fault tolerance reasons, each client is guaranteed to run on at least 2 different Amazon AMIs. The Convertigo Cloud monitoring system detects when an AMI is down and restarts it automatically.
By referring to the Web Transactions and Legacy Transactions sections, one can calculate the standard Convertigo overheads per type of application, for a standard Intel machine (as defined earlier).
Minimum processing time: approx. 45 ms, without the optional steps (server-side XSLT, billing).
Main parameters affecting the overhead:
Simple extraction
Average extraction
Complex extraction
Simple screen
80 ms
160 ms
1060 ms
Average screen
115 ms
1100 ms
Complex screen
165 ms
245 ms
1145 ms
Minimum processing time: approx. 30 ms, without the optional steps.
Simple extraction
Average extraction
Complex extraction
Simple screen
40 ms
45 ms
135 ms
Average screen
45 ms
140 ms
Complex screen
50 ms
60 ms
150 ms
On a standard Intel machine (as defined earlier) and with transactions of average complexity (the mean/mean value in the above tables), the estimated processing capacity is about 5 Convertigo Web transactions or 20 Convertigo legacy transactions per second and per processor core, i.e. about 8 Web transactions or 34 legacy transactions on a computer with a dual-core processor.
A “transaction” corresponds to a function in Convertigo Studio and includes a start page / screen, multiple actions on that page (filling in certain fields, clicking buttons, etc.), then receiving and processing a response page (identifying the screen class, executing the various extraction rules) and putting together the result.
NB: when calculating the number of transactions one should take into account the number of legacy application screens / pages that are actually accessed. For example, if the execution of a transaction requires a prior connection, then two screens will have been accessed.
As we saw in the Simultaneous Transactions section, you should avoid running Convertigo servers near the saturation limit of their CPU and memory resources. In order to preserve headroom for absorbing peak loads, we suggest a resource utilization value of 50%, allowing for 4 Web transactions or 17 legacy transactions.
4 Web transactions per second:
17 legacy transactions per second:
If you need to execute a larger number of transactions, you should either use a more powerful machine (faster, more processors, etc.) or deploy multiple C-EMS servers.
A Convertigo server takes up at least 256 MB in a JVM.
The memory footprint of a Convertigo legacy context is about 7 MB, allowing some 300 contexts to be handled simultaneously in a well-configured JVM, in a 32-bit environment.
The memory footprint of a Convertigo Web context is about 10 MB. To these quantities, you should add the space for the connection pool and the cache, if used.
All of the above values are averages, which may be useful at the start of a project. But before any deployment phase, you should enable the traces in the C-EMS administration console and take real measurements of the various steps in your actual Convertigo transactions.
To begin with, these measurements should be made without enabling the different Convertigo optimization mechanisms. Based on these response time observations, one can then determine which Convertigo optimizations are the most relevant, verify that the response times evolve as expected, and size the servers accordingly.
To be able to size Convertigo servers correctly in production, you need to have a solid understanding of how C-EMS works. Although the Convertigo consultants are available to help the deployment teams calculate or validate sizings on request, it is perfectly possible to do the necessary calculations in-house.
It is important to understand that C-EMS calls existing applications at an external level, just as users would. This preserves all of the existing business logic, without the need for new development, but it also introduces an intermediate layer, and therefore an additional response time. This additional time is generally negligible compared to the execution time of the legacy applications, but it is important to factor it in when calculating how many simultaneous transactions a given server can handle.
Remember that it is preferable to deploy multiple C-EMS instances of average size on a server rather than a single very large instance.
The C-EMS Cloud deployment solution provides appreciable flexibility for dealing with sizing questions.
Disclaimer: the numerical data (response times and transaction numbers) used in this document represent values observed in a specific hardware and software environment, on a particular type of application, and should only be understood as indicating orders of magnitude.
On no account do they represent a commitment by Convertigo with regard to the performance and optimization of applications produced with C-EMS.