As a continuation of evaluating an NIO server for my iPhone game, I started with looking at pure performance. First, the following links provide already existant benchmarks:
- http://swamp.homelinux.net/blog/index.php/2009/03/03/performance-comparison-of-apache-mina-and-jboss-netty/
- http://gleamynode.net/articles/2232/
- http://mina.apache.org/performance-test-reports.html
I took my own samples and quickly ran some basic tests as well to just get a really rough idea. Note that these metrics should be taken with a large grain of salt as they do not attempt to optimize any of the test libraries and the clients are all run in traditional threads on non-server class machines alongside the actual servers. Thus, these tests are quickly CPU bound on the client. The idea is to just get a very rough estimate to compare alongside the above tests.
That point aside, my test basically creates a echo server and echo client. It then starts up X simultaneous threads that push a simple ‘testing’ string back and forth to the server as fast as it can. The end result is the time it takes to send a message and receive the echo in milliseconds.