Stress Testing Your Beans

Using ECperf 1.0

Sun has released ECperf 1.0, which is a performance workload toolkit for measuring the scalability and performance of EJB servers and containers. Although it's not specifically designed to help you test your EJB applications, it can give you some good insight on building more scalable J2EE applications and also help in tuning your applications. Its primary purpose is to allow J2EE server vendors to improve and publicize the performance of their products using a standard set of benchmarks.

ECperf uses a set of four domains that model real-world Internet applications and provide a small but very relevant cross-section of the types of applications being built by J2EE developers. The domains the ECperf uses are

• The Customer domain, which handles customer orders and interactions

• The Manufacturing domain, which performs the Just In Time manufacturing operations

• The Supplier domain, which handles interactions with external suppliers

• The Corporate domain, which is the master keeper of customer, parts , and supplier information

You can download the ECperf Specification, which describes the benchmark and the rules that govern the types of tests, from the following Web site:

http://java.sun.com/j2ee/ecperf/download.html

ECperf comes with a kit that consists of the following items:

• Enterprise JavaBeans that make up the test applications

• A Web client that uses JSP pages for interactive testing

• The required schema and scripts to preload the database with data

• The capability to make files and deployment descriptors for the J2EE Reference Implementation (RI)

• A driver program, which implements the run rules and simulates the client load

The kit is available free, but only through the early access program. If you have not already created an account in the Java Developer Connection, you will need to do so to download the kit.

Caution

Because the ECperf is still considered an early access release, publishing the results of any tests using it is strictly prohibited . The purpose of the early release of ECperf is to allow the public to evaluate and provide feedback on the benchmark.