Improving Tapestry performance

I just spent the week with a high profile client that is interested in potentially using Tapestry for a very large scale site ... millions of hits per hour. Their in-house framework is quite capable of operating at this scale, through a combination of draconian restrictions on database access and server-side state, and a total avoidance of any kind of reflective object access. These are people who literally cannot give an inch on performance.

One of the ideas that bounced around was something promised for some future release of OGNL: bytecode enhancement. That is, in some cases, OGNL 3 is expected to identify places where it can create a class on the fly to expedite access to a property, rather than always relying on reflective access as it does today.

Alas, that hasn't happened yet, and Tapestry is still using OGNL 2.6.7.

But, I thought, what if we created a new binding prefix to use instead of OGNL, for this purpose. Because of HiveMind, this approach can be packaged seperately from the framework proper, and plug right in.

... and it works. I built a little peformance test harness and tried to figure out how many nanoseconds it takes to perform an operation; an operation involves a read and then an update. Here's one of the operations from the harness:

        Op op = new Op()
        {
            public void run(PropertyAccessor accessor)
            {
                Long value = (Long) accessor.readProperty();

                long primitive = value.longValue();

                accessor.writeProperty(new Long(primitive + 1));
            }
        };

The PropertyAccessor object is either created from bytecode, or implemented using OGNL (so that we can make the comparisons).

I did a number of test runs, with a number of operations:

              10000 iterations |  Direct ns |    OGNL ns
------------------------------ | ---------- | ----------
                 name - warmup |    4288.00 |  847364.00
                          name |    1777.00 |   18426.00
                  int - warmup |    2891.00 |   81127.00
                           int |     838.00 |    7497.00
                 long - warmup |    2969.00 |   28207.00
                          long |     617.00 |    7256.00

             100000 iterations |  Direct ns |    OGNL ns
------------------------------ | ---------- | ----------
                 name - warmup |    4282.00 |  819634.00
                          name |     972.00 |    7527.00
                  int - warmup |    2947.00 |   74425.00
                           int |     242.00 |    5955.00
                 long - warmup |    2910.00 |   27492.00
                          long |     209.00 |    6046.00

             500000 iterations |  Direct ns |    OGNL ns
------------------------------ | ---------- | ----------
                 name - warmup |    4182.00 |  852125.00
                          name |     857.00 |    6756.00
                  int - warmup |    2958.00 |   81820.00
                           int |     170.00 |    5724.00
                 long - warmup |    2793.00 |   34990.00
                          long |     215.00 |    5785.00

          2,000,000 iterations |  Direct ns |    OGNL ns
------------------------------ | ---------- | ----------
                 name - warmup |    4251.00 |  843185.00
                          name |     823.00 |    6553.00
                  int - warmup |    2927.00 |   48788.00
                           int |     144.00 |    5799.00
                 long - warmup |    2961.00 |   34945.00
                          long |     180.00 |    6173.00

The results show that the direct access is around 10x faster than reflective access, which is in line with the general documentation about reflection in JDK 1.5. Still, I'm troubled that the cost per operation seems to continue going down as the number of operations increases. This could be the effect of hotspot (though the elapsed time seems short for hotspot to get very involved) ... or it could represent a problem in my performance test fixture.

To use this, you just use the prefix "prop:" instead of "ognl:". And, of course, it only works for simple properties, not property paths or the full kind of expressions used in OGNL.

I'm hosting the code on JavaForge and will make some kind of release available soon. Perhaps it will migrate into the framework proper at some point.