Scalable JMS cluster solution?

[wengatz_n]

Hi,
in our project we have the requirement for a scalable asynchronous
communication protocol. We started with evaluation of different JMS
products (f.e. JBOSSMQ, SonicMQ, OpenJMS).

We are happy with JBossMQ, we were able to send and receive about
4000 msgs per second (topic with 40 subscribers) on one node. The next task is to improve the performance further by using a clustered environment.

Therefore we performed some tests with a JBoss 3.2.5 cluster and found out that JMS is deployed as a HASingleton. That means we will get a reliable JMS solution but not a scalable solution with our cluster.

And now my questions:
===============

Can this behavior be modified? If not are there plans to provide
a scalable JMS cluster solution? In the JBoss 4 Roadmap I found the
information that reliability has higher priority as scalability, but could you
please give my an idea if and when we can expect a scalable JMS
solution.

Thanks a lot and Best regards
Nicole

[genman]

It is somewhat scalable, as the processing per message can be done across all your nodes. The limitation is that the node acting as the server may not be able to serve messages fast enough to the client nodes. This may scale well enough for your application, especially because message processing time is often quite a bit longer than managing the message itself. If a message takes 100ms to process by the client and 10ms to handle by the server (persist, send over the socket, etc.) you can have one server serve 10 nodes.

Unfortuantely, there is no active developer initiative at the moment to create a distributed solution, though JBoss 4 would likely help support such an architecture. Your thoughts are welcome on the developer forum.