Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking of the JXTA Peer-To-Peer Platform

by Halepovic, Emir

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are a relatively new addition to the large area of distributed computer systems. The emphasis on sharing resources, self-organization and use of discovery mechanisms sets the P2P systems apart from other forms of distributed computing.

Project JXTA is the first P2P application development platform, consisting of standard protocols, programming tools and multi-language implementations. A JXTA peer network is a complex overlay, constructed on top of the physical network, with its own identification scheme and routing.

This thesis investigates the performance of JXTA using benchmarking. The presented work includes the development of the JXTA Performance Model and Benchmark Suite, as well as the collection and analysis of the performance results. By evaluating three major versions of the protocol implementations in a variety of configurations, the performance characteristics, limitations, bottlenecks and trade-offs are observed and discussed.

It is shown that the complexity of JXTA allows many factors to affect its performance and that several JXTA components exhibit unintuitive and unexpected behavior. However, the results also reveal the ways to maximize the performance of the deployed and newly designed systems.

The evolution of JXTA through several versions shows some notable improvements, especially in search and discovery models and added messaging components, which make JXTA a promising member of the future generation of computer systems.