Self-regulating Message Throughput in Enterprise Messaging Servers – A Feedback Control Solution

Enterprise Messaging is a very popular message exchange concept in asynchronous distributed computing environments. The Enterprise Messaging Servers are heavily used in building business critical Enterprise applications such as Internet based Order processing systems, pricing distribution of B2B, geographically dispersed enterprise applications. It is always desirable that Messaging Servers exhibit high performance to meet the Service Level Agreements (SLAs). There are investigations in this area of managing the performance of the distributed computing systems in different ways such as the IT administrators configuring and tuning the Messaging Servers parameters, implement complex conditional programming to handle the workload dynamics. But in practice it is extremely difficult to handle such dynamics of changing workloads in order to meet the performance requirements. Additionally it is challenging to cater to the future resource requirements based on the future workloads. Though there have been attempts to self-regulate the performance of Enterprise Messaging Servers, there is a limited investigation done in exploring feedback control systems theory in managing the Messaging Servers performance. We propose an adaptive control based solution to not only manage the performance of the servers to meet SLAs but also to pro-actively self-regulate the performance such that the Messaging Servers are capable to meet the current and future workloads. We implemented and evaluated our solution and observed that the control theory based solution will improve the performance of Enterprise Messaging Servers significantly. Keywords-Feedback control; Message Oriented Middleware; Enterprise Messaging; Java Messaging Service; JMS Providers; Adaptive Control