A workload model for topic-based publish/subscribe systems

Abstract

Publish/Subscribe is an asynchronous messaging paradigm that has been an integral part of modern Message Oriented Middle-ware (MOM) frameworks. However, recent initiatives to enhance usability and friendliness of modern web-based clients have ex-tended the use of publish/subscribe schemes beyond middleware. Some of the recent protocols, like Bayeux [6], use topic-based publish/subscribe scheme to exchange messages between front-end web-based clients and back-end servers. This paper shares our experience in designing a load-generation framework for benchmarking of an HTTP-based publish/subscribe module for an enterprise Java application server. The paper starts with an introduction to topic-based publish/subscribe paradigm by describing the major entities, along with their roles and relation-ships. Major issues related to modeling and benchmarking sys-tems in a topic-based publish/subscribe paradigm are highlighted. We propose an abstract model that is helpful in workload genera-tion, data collection, and benchmarking of such systems. We also share our experience in designing and using a framework for per-formance engineering and improvements of a publish/subscribe system. This framework uses our proposed model. The paper con-cludes with sharing short-comings of the proposed model and framework, and our plans to extend this work for other asynchro-nous and synchronous messaging paradigms.