AWS Compute Blog

Measuring the throughput for Amazon MQ using the JMS Benchmark

NOTE: September 4, 2024 – This post is now considered deprecated and replaced by this newer post “Measuring Amazon MQ throughput using Maven 2 benchmark and AWS CDK“

This post is courtesy of Trevor Dyck, Sr. Product Manager, AWS Messaging, and Alan Protasio, Software Development Engineer, Amazon Web Services

Just like compute and storage, messaging is a fundamental building block of enterprise applications. Message brokers (aka “message-oriented middleware”) enable different software systems, often written in different languages, on different platforms, running in different locations, to communicate and exchange information. Mission-critical applications, such as CRM and ERP, rely on message brokers to work.

A common performance consideration for customers deploying a message broker in a production environment is the throughput of the system, measured as messages per second. This is important to know so that application environments (hosts, threads, memory, etc.) can be configured correctly.

In this post, we demonstrate how to measure the throughput for Amazon MQ, a new managed message broker service for ActiveMQ, using JMS Benchmark. It should take between 15–20 minutes to set up the environment and an hour to run the benchmark. We also provide some tips on how to configure Amazon MQ for optimal throughput.

Benchmarking throughput for Amazon MQ

ActiveMQ can be used for a number of use cases. These use cases can range from simple fire and forget tasks (that is, asynchronous processing), low-latency request-reply patterns, to buffering requests before they are persisted to a database.

The throughput of Amazon MQ is largely dependent on the use case. For example, if you have non-critical workloads such as gathering click events for a non-business-critical portal, you can use ActiveMQ in a non-persistent mode and get extremely high throughput with Amazon MQ.

On the flip side, if you have a critical workload where durability is extremely important (meaning that you can’t lose a message), then you are bound by the I/O capacity of your underlying persistence store. We recommend using mq.m4.large for the best results. The mq.t2.micro instance type is intended for product evaluation. Performance is limited, due to the lower memory and burstable CPU performance.

Tip: To improve your throughput with Amazon MQ, make sure that you have consumers processing messaging as fast as (or faster than) your producers are pushing messages.

Because it’s impossible to talk about how the broker (ActiveMQ) behaves for each and every use case, we walk through how to set up your own benchmark for Amazon MQ using our favorite open-source benchmarking tool: JMS Benchmark. We are fans of the JMS Benchmark suite because it’s easy to set up and deploy, and comes with a built-in visualizer of the results.

Non-Persistent Scenarios – Queue latency as you scale producer throughput

JMS Benchmark nonpersistent scenarios

Getting started

At the time of publication, you can create an mq.m4.large single-instance broker for testing for $0.30 per hour (US pricing).

This walkthrough covers the following tasks:

  1.  Create and configure the broker.
  2. Create an EC2 instance to run your benchmark
  3. Configure the security groups
  4.  Run the benchmark.

Step 1 – Create and configure the broker
Create and configure the broker using Tutorial: Creating and Configuring an Amazon MQ Broker.

Step 2 – Create an EC2 instance to run your benchmark
Launch the EC2 instance using Step 1: Launch an Instance. We recommend choosing the m5.large instance type.

Step 3 – Configure the security groups
Make sure that all the security groups are correctly configured to let the traffic flow between the EC2 instance and your broker.

  1. Sign in to the Amazon MQ console.
  2. From the broker list, choose the name of your broker (for example, MyBroker)
  3. In the Details section, under Security and network, choose the name of your security group or choose the expand icon ( ).
  4. From the security group list, choose your security group.
  5. At the bottom of the page, choose Inbound, Edit.
  6. In the Edit inbound rules dialog box, add a role to allow traffic between your instance and the broker:
    • Choose Add Rule.
    • For Type, choose Custom TCP.
    • For Port Range, type the ActiveMQ SSL port (61617).
    • For Source, leave Custom selected and then type the security group of your EC2 instance.
    • Choose Save.

Your broker can now accept the connection from your EC2 instance.

Step 4 – Run the benchmark
Connect to your EC2 instance using SSH and run the following commands:

$ cd ~
$ curl -L https://github.com/alanprot/jms-benchmark/archive/master.zip -o master.zip
$ unzip master.zip
$ cd jms-benchmark-master
$ chmod a+x bin/*
$ env \
  SERVER_SETUP=false \
  SERVER_ADDRESS={activemq-endpoint} \
  ACTIVEMQ_TRANSPORT=ssl\
  ACTIVEMQ_PORT=61617 \
  ACTIVEMQ_USERNAME={activemq-user} \
  ACTIVEMQ_PASSWORD={activemq-password} \
  ./bin/benchmark-activemq

After the benchmark finishes, you can find the results in the ~/reports directory. As you may notice, the performance of ActiveMQ varies based on the number of consumers, producers, destinations, and message size.

Amazon MQ architecture

The last bit that’s important to know so that you can better understand the results of the benchmark is how Amazon MQ is architected.

Amazon MQ is architected to be highly available (HA) and durable. For HA, we recommend using the multi-AZ option. After a message is sent to Amazon MQ in persistent mode, the message is written to the highly durable message store that replicates the data across multiple nodes in multiple Availability Zones. Because of this replication, for some use cases you may see a reduction in throughput as you migrate to Amazon MQ. Customers have told us they appreciate the benefits of message replication as it helps protect durability even in the face of the loss of an Availability Zone.

Conclusion

We hope this gives you an idea of how Amazon MQ performs. We encourage you to run tests to simulate your own use cases.

To learn more, see the Amazon MQ website. You can try Amazon MQ for free with the AWS Free Tier, which includes up to 750 hours of a single-instance mq.t2.micro broker and up to 1 GB of storage per month for one year.