Performance: Extracting security credentials from requests

[beve]

As part of the performance work that David and I are working on I've been looking into ways to improve the performance when we extract security credentials from different message and transport protocols.

Currently we are using Smooks and the reason for that choice simply that was the quickest for me to implement.
I've now looked at using Stax and also at SXC (http://sxc.codehaus.org/Home)

I've taken one of the extractors which extract the Username element data and the Password elements data from a SOAP Security Header. The SOAP message is a String in this case and not a SOAPMessage object instance.

Following are the result that I've gathered:

Smooks
======
Test: WSSecurityInfoExtractorUnitTest.extractUserPassSecurityInfo
1ms 1969497ns
1ms 1985770ns
2ms 2154726ns
2ms 2325567ns
2ms 2807360ns
3ms 3157355ns
5ms 5156815ns
6ms 6649339ns
7ms 7066943ns
11ms 11248229ns

SXC
===
Test: WSSecurityInfoExtractorSXCUnitTest.extractUserPassSecurityInfo
16ms 16576305ns
18ms 18043196ns
23ms 23826942ns
24ms 24942720ns
28ms 28823322ns
31ms 31506149ns
32ms 32187070ns
45ms 45235491ns
59ms 59891821ns
93ms 93950116ns

Stax
====
Test: WSSecurityInfoExtractorStaxUnitTest.extractUserPassSecurityInfo
0ms 641808ns
0ms 647256ns
0ms 662552ns
0ms 666883ns
0ms 675334ns
0ms 678756ns
0ms 720663ns
0ms 743293ns
1ms 1771975ns
11ms 11028217ns

So I think Stax is the way to go here. If no one objects I'll create a Jira for this.

/Daniel

[kconner]

This may be an obvious question but can you explain what the timings represent? I'm assuming they represent some message size, perhaps incorrectly.

Also, can you explain the difference between the last two timings on the Stax run so that we can understand the big jump?

Thanks
Kev

[beve]

Sorry about the confusion. I've re-done the test and hopefully this will be clearer and give more accurate results. Please disregard my previous post.

I'll create a wiki page for this so that we can edit it if required. I'll post back with a link to the wiki page.

Regards,

/Daniel

[beve]

The following wiki page has been created :
http://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/ESBSecurityExtractionPerformance

Regards,

/Daniel