Performance comparison of JAX-RS 2.0 implementations

I was looking for a short comparison of JAX-RS 2.0 implementations and I could not find one that compared their response times, so I had to do it myself.

I'm sure some will argue that speed is not the most important characteristic of a REST framework, and things like stability, maturity, advanced features matter more. Well, they may or may not be right, but in any case performance is an important aspect.

Tested frameworks

While surely I missed someone's pet JAX-RS framework, I think I have selected the three mainstream ones:

• CXF - I use it for several years, I have always been a happy user
• Jersey - The reference implementation from Sun/Oracle
• Resteasy - The JBoss implementation of JAX-RS

Test method

Project layout

• I have implemented a single Hello service annotated with JAX-RS annotations, this is in a separate maven module and used by framework-specific webapps.
• All web modules are configured with Jackson 2
• For simplicity, the services are registered in spring, however Jersey does not allow it the way Resteasy and CXF do
• All tests are performed using Jetty 9.2.2.
• For warm-up, I gave each test 1M requests on a single thread.
• The test tool was the Apache httpd benchmark utility 'ab'. Each result was performed separately with 100.000 requests and 1,2,4,8,16 concurrent threads.
• Source code of the tests available on github.
• All tests performed on the same laptop. Fedora 20, Oracle Java 1.7.0_45, AMD E2-1800 wreck

Results

Comments

I was kind of surpried to see how much better Resteasy performed and looked under the hoods of the frameworks to figure out what they do when I hit the URL. Well, after a few hours of digging I concluded that most of it is the abstraction layer. CXF is not only for REST but also for JAX-WS, it can consume messages with JMS and so on, and that abstraction layer takes it.

I have also implemented a very thin experimental JAX-RS 2.0 implementation to see how that works and with the same tests it outperformed the mainstream frameworks with roughly 2000 request/second. I would not dare to replace CXF with that :-D but kind of interesting to think about it.