Choosing Component Middleware Based on Performance Evaluation

Distributed object models form the basis for distributed component-based applications. This paper is focused on qualitative and quantitative analysis of two most important distributed object models for use with the Java programming language: CORBA and RMI. We compare both models in terms of features, maturity, legacy system support and ease of development. Special attention is paid to performance. We present performance results based on a real world application for different scenarios that include single client and multi client configurations and different data types and sizes. We evaluate multi threading strategies and analyze code in order to identify the most time consuming methods. We compare the results and give hints and conclusions. We have found that because of its complexity CORBA is slightly slower than RMI in simple scenarios. On the other hand CORBA handles multiple simultaneous clients and larger data sizes better and suffers from far lower performance degradation under heavy client load. The article presents a solid basis for making a decision about the underlying distributed object model.