News

MSMQ Outperforms IBM MQSeries on NSTL Benchmark

• By Scott Bekker
• May 17, 2000

Microsoft Corp. announced the results of an independent study which showed that Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), Microsoft's message-oriented middleware service, is nearly 10 times faster than IBM Corp.'s MQSeries in identical testing scenarios.

Message queuing is an important component for building Web applications because it allows information sent from one application to be delivered to the intended destination, whether or not the destination is currently available. According to the report, 4,000 byte MSMQ messages achieved an average throughput of 7,590 messages per second on a single machine, while 4,000 byte MQSeries messages averaged 736 messages per second in a duplicate environment.

The benchmark, conducted by independent software testing agency NSTL (www.nstl.com), consisted of both messages sent and messages received segments. Persistent, non-persistent, and transactional messages were sent and received with various sizes and thread counts. The tests were performed on two configurations, a high-performance hard drive system and a conventional hard drive system comparable with most desktop computers. Both computers ran Windows 2000 and the latest versions of MSMQ, version 2.0, and MQSeries, version 5.1.

The high-performance setup consisted of a Compaq (www.compaq.com) ProLiant 5000 PC with a 200MHz Intel (www.intel.com) Pentium Pro CPU, 256 MB RAM, and 11 4-GB hard drives. The conventional setup consisted of a Dell (www.dell.com) Optiplex Gxpro PC, two 200-MHz Pentium Pro CPUs, 130 MB RAM, and one 12-GB hard drive.

The benchmarking tool was MQBench, originally written by Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) in the Visual C++ development environment to measure the performance of sending and receiving messages in MSMQ. For this evaluation, the code was proted to MQSeries by Level 8 Systems Inc. (www.level8.com), recognized MQSeries experts. MQBench determines the conditions of the test by defining different message sizes, thread counts, and message types.

MSMQ is an integrated feature of the Windows 2000 operating system. It provides asynchronous reliable communications to computers and applications that are intermittently unavailable. - Isaac Slepner