OpenLiberty – Performance

In the course of our open source project Imixs-Office-Workflow, I have now examined OpenLiberty in more detail. And I came up to the conclusion that OpenLiberty has a very impressive performance.

Docker

I run OpenLiberty in Docker in the version ‘20.0.0.3-full-java8-openj9-ubi’. Our application is a full featured Workflow Management Suite with a Web Interface and also a Rest API. So for OpenLiberty we use the following feature set:

...
	<featureManager>
		<feature>javaee-8.0</feature>
		<feature>microProfile-2.2</feature>>
		<feature>javaMail-1.6</feature>
	</featureManager>
...

As recommended by OpenLiberty I use the following Dockerfile layout:

FROM openliberty/open-liberty:20.0.0.3-full-java8-openj9-ubi
# Copy postgres JDBC driver
COPY ./postgresql-9.4.1212.jar /opt/ol/wlp/lib
# Add config
COPY --chown=1001:0 ./server.xml /config/server.xml

# Activate Debug Mode...
# COPY --chown=1001:0 ./jvm.options /config/

# Copy sample application
COPY ./imixs-office-workflow*.war /config/dropins/

RUN configure.sh

The important part here is the RUN command at the end of the Dockerfile. This script adds the requested XML snippets and grow image to be fit-for-purpose. This makes the docker build process a little bit slower, but the startup of the image is very fast.

I measured a startup time of round about 12 seconds. This is very fast for the size and complexity of this application. And it is a little bit faster than the startup of Wildfly with round about 15 seconds. Only in case of a hot-redeploy of the application Wildfly seems to be a little bit faster (6 seconds) in compare to OpenLiberty (8 seconds).

	Open Liberty	Wildfly
Docker Startup Time	12 sec	15 sec
Application Hot Deploy	8 sec	6 sec

Debug Mode

Note: activating the debug port makes OpenLiberty performance very poor. So do not forget to deactivate debugging in productive mode! The debug mode can be activated by providing a jvm.options file like this:

-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=7777

I have commented on this in the Dockerfile example above.