# HTTP Load Balancer on Top of WSO2 Gateway — Part 2: Performance Benchmarks


![banner-gsoc2016_2.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1668358081421/n6O9TKZrX.png align="left")
In my [**previous post**](https://venkat2811.blogspot.in/2016/08/http-load-balancer-on-top-of-wso2.html), I discussed Load Balancer Engine Architecture and its features. In this post, I’ll be discussing on performance bench-marks.

Kindly note that the underlying carbon-gateway-framework is under development. And hence more features will be developed and improvisations will be done to this LB.

### Performance Benchmarks

In this performance test, five instances of simple service created using Netty framework were used. Each instance is a **fast backend (0s delay)** with **response of size 1KB**.

**One Million (1,000,000) requests** were sent at different **concurrency levels (500 to 12,000)** to Netty backend, Nginx (Open source version) and GW-LB using apache bench via automated script.

Benchmarks were conducted in Round-Robin algorithm mode with no persistence policies.

More details can be found [**here**](https://github.com/wso2-incubator/HTTP-Load-balancer/tree/master/performance-benchmark#performance-test-using-high-performance-netty-back-end).

### Test Bed

These are the configurations used during bench-marking.

#### VM Details

*   `**Guest OS :**` Ubuntu 64-bit 16.04 VM
*   `**RAM :**` 8 GB
*   `**CPU cores :**` 4
*   `**JVM Version :**` 1.8.0\_91
*   `**Java Runtime :**` Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0\_91-b14)
*   `**Java HotSpot :**` Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.91-b14, mixed mode)

#### Host Machine Details

*   `**Host OS :**` OS X EI Captain Version 10.11.5 (15F34) MacBook Pro (Mid 2015)
*   `**Hypervisor :**` VMware Fusion Professional Version 8.1.1 (3771013)
*   `**Processor :**` 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7
*   `**Memory :**` 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

**Note:** **HTTP Load Balancer on Top of WSO2 Gateway** is referred as **GW-LB**.

### Throughput Test

Tests were done twice. Average of ‘Average throughput’ for each concurrency level is calculated and plotted.

**Figure 1** shows throughput comparison between Open Source Nginx and GW-LB and **Figure 1.1** shows throughput comparison along with Netty backend.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1668355838343/g4AHVA72J.png)

**Figure 1 : Nginx Open Source Version vs GW-LB**

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1668355839793/n_1zahJDN.png)

**Figure 1.1 : Nginx Open Source Version vs GW-LB along with Netty Back-End**

### Latency Test

Tests were done twice. Average of ‘Mean Latency’ for each concurrency level is calculated and plotted.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1668355840902/tQkvfshSr.png)

**Figure 2: Nginx Open Source Version vs GW-LB along with Netty BE**

### Memory Test

**Java Flight Recorder (JFR)** is enabled while starting LB server and recording is stopped after load test ends. The obtained JFR recording has memory usage details.

**Figure 3** shows **Committed, Reserved and Used Heap** values.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1668355842109/4WVeCjdak.png)

**Figure 3: Committed vs Reserved vs Used Heap memory values of GW-LB**

It took three code reviews and several rounds of performance bench-marking to get these results. Guidance and suggestions from my mentors and community members were very helpful. I enjoyed discussing with my mentors and it was a great learning too! I loved this phase of my GSoC project more than any because our discussions were very good and I could sense that my mentors were also as eager and motivated as me to achieve good performance.

I also kept track of the performance improvisation that we were doing by creating it as an issue so that it might be helpful one day. You can find it [**here**](https://github.com/Venkat2811/product-http-load-balancer/issues/5).

### Sample Configuration

*   You can find a sample config [**here**](https://github.com/wso2-incubator/HTTP-Load-balancer#sample-configuration).
*   Also find more samples [**here**](https://github.com/wso2-incubator/HTTP-Load-balancer/tree/master/product/carbon-home/samples).

Kindly note that DSL and underlying Gateway Framework is evolving and it will change over the period of time.

### Javadoc

*   You can find javadoc [**here**](https://github.com/wso2-incubator/HTTP-Load-balancer/blob/master/docs/javadoc_http_load_balancer.zip).

Thanks for reading and Happy Coding !

*Originally published at* [HTTP Load Balancer on Top of WSO2 Gateway — Part 2: Performance Benchmarks](https://venkat2811.blogspot.com/2016/08/http-load-balancer-on-top-of-wso2_18.html) *on August 18, 2016.*