Performance Impact Analysis of Two Generic Group Communication APIs

This paper presents an analysis of the performance impact of two generic group communication APIs, namely Hedera and jGCS. The analysis was carried out in a four-node cluster by comparing the performance of different configurations of two well-known group communication middleware systems (i.e., JGroups and Spread), under different message sizes, both in standalone mode and when used as plug-ins for the two generic APIs. The results show that there are significant variations in the performance overhead imposed by each generic API on both JGroups and Spread, and that those differences are strongly related to variations in message size and the way each generic API is implemented. The paper also discusses whether it would be worth migrating from a standalone group communication implementation to a generic API.