Performance and scalability measurement of COTS EJB technology

Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) is the core technology of J2EE platform to provide the foundation for scalable enterprise applications. About 30 product vendors provide implementations of the J2EE/EJB specification. As each of these products is designed and implemented differently, they show radically different performance profiles. To complicate this technology space, product vendors of J2EE products typically provide different infrastructure options and tuning techniques to address the requirements of performance and scalability. Therefore it is essential for developers to understand the performance and scalability issues of COTS EJB technologies so that the system can meet the performance requirements. In this paper, we investigate an approach to measure the performance and scalability of COTS EJB technology based on its architecture and technology analysis. A benchmark application is developed and tested to measure the system's performance as both the client load and component infrastructure are scaled up. The empirical results are presented and analyzed to evaluate the performance and scalability of the EJB technology under study.