Toward scalable real-time messaging

Conventional messaging technologies have been designed for large transactional systems, making the prediction and calibration of their delay impractical. In this paper, we present a minimal messaging system, implemented in Java™, that is designed to enable the analysis, modeling, and calibration of the expected performance of these technologies. We describe the algorithms and protocols that underlie this messaging system, show how an analysis can be performed, and give the actual measured performance figures. We show that the system achieves a throughput of more than 100,000 messages per second with less than 120-millisecond maximum latency, in the test environment. At 10,000 messages per second, a maximum latency of 5 milliseconds is measured. The algorithms make use of lock-free data structures, which allow the throughput to scale on multi-core systems.