Microsoft’s Greg Leake recently penned a digest article describing a benchmark the company produced that compared a .NET server setup to an IBM WebSphere server setup. The task at hand was a stock trading application. It is hard to recall a time when a company published a benchmark competition that it lost, and this one does not break with that precedent. Leake tells us that, from past experience, he is quite aware of the cynicism that can greet such studies, but that he finds benchmarks can elicit worthwhile comments. He agrees that there can be fun and insight in the froth of remarks that usually follow benchmark publications. We offer the digest version [PDF] of the benchmark with that in mind.

The benchmark at hand seeks to compare the performance of Web services stacks using an equivalent workload and WSDL. Leake et al re-engineered IBM’s Trade 6.1 performance application to run on .NET 3.0, creating a benchmark app known as .NET Stocktrader. Details of the test beds are available in the PDF post we provide, although the really complete info is to be found in the full document on the MS site. Among the highlights [from the MS point of view]: Windows Communication Foundation running over MSMQ had 67% better throughput than the IBM WebSphere JMS/SIB message queue configuration using EJB/entity beans. Pulling EJB out of the equation and using JDBC yielded a less startling throughput differential of 16.2%.

An interesting bit about the benchmark, and a reason why we provide it here on TheServerSide Interoperability Blog is that it may serve to illustrate bi-directional interoperability between .NET and WebSphere using Web services and WCF. The .NET StockTrader application can interoperate with the J2EE services of the WebSphere 6.1 StockTrade application, according to Leake. Conversely, the WebSphere  app can use the services of the .NET StockTrader, he said. Take a look at it, tell TheServerSide community what you think.

Related
Download the Digest Description of the  DotNet-WebSphere Web Services Benchmark – TSS.NET [PDF]
More information on the Microsoft WebSphere Web Services Benchmark [including the complete 98-page Benchmark document] - MSDN

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under XML/Web services, Interoperability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.