At my job, I am evaluating some microservices platform options. A good way to test them is doing some benchmarks. Everybody likes benchmarks. So, why not?

Disclaimer: although I tried to make conditions fair and “scientific”, it’s an amateur benchmark and I’m making this for fun. Please, don’t take it too seriously.

Why Quarkus?

It’s the “supersonic subatomic Java” framework, sponsored by Red Hat. My work place is a Red Hat shop and we have many subscriptions from them. So, Quarkus is not only a good fit, but we already use it on some projects. It promises a better startup time and memory footprint. Tested version: 1.6.1.

Why Phoenix

Well, personal preference. I like Elixir, it is a powerful and fun language. When you discover Erlang and what problems it was made to solve, you will find it amazing. WhatsApp, Discord and many others use it. The framework of choice for the Elixir language is Phoenix. Achieving 2 million connections in a single machine is really impressive too. Tested version: 1.5.4.

The benchmark

I couldn’t find any real benchmarks on these technologies. There is this benchmark on Netty and Cowboy, which are the technologies behind these frameworks, but using a “sleep” to simulate load is not ok. These frameworks handle databases and connection pools differently. Acquiring a database connection from a pool can timeout and throw an exception. A “sleep” command won’t timeout. Serializing data to JSON also impose memory and CPU usage.

Techempower does something different, but it uses good hardware and low load. Its focus is on how many requests per second a framework can handle, and this is not ok too. _I need to know what framework can handle more requests within constrained hardware, like a Heroku dyno. _So, speed isn’t a concern at this point.

In this benchmark, I decided to use my work development database and data. It’s an Oracle database and my test data is on a table with 5 columns and 6000 rows. Yes, it is a lot of JSON, so it can force some timeouts, CPU and memory usage. Although Oracle JDBC driver is well tested and supported, in Phoenix we must rely on jamdb_oracle package. It works well and it is maintained, but it’s not “official”. Oracle database driver is not a first class citizen on Quarkus either, and we can not compile it to a native image using GraalVM out of the box.

#phoenix-elixir #quarkus #openjdk #web-development-framework #elixir #web-development #software-development #erlang