Canonical Benchmark

This section presents results from a canonical benchmark that measures the end-to-end performance of X Platform's core message processing capabilities.

What is Benchmarked

The canonical benchmark measures the Receive-Process-Send flow of a clustered microservice, which represents the fundamental operation pattern of most X Platform applications:

1. Receive - AEP Engine receives an inbound message

2. Dispatch to Handler - Engine starts a transaction and dispatches message to microservice

3. Process - Microservice message handler executes:

   • 3.1. Read and write state POJOs - Business logic accesses and modifies state

   • 3.2. Send outbound messages - Business logic creates response messages (held by engine)

4. Return from Handler - Control returns to the engine

5. Commit - Engine commits the transaction, which includes:

   • Replicating state changes and outbound messages to backup

   • Persisting changes to disk (asynchronous, non-blocking)

   • Receiving stability acknowledgment from backup

6. Send Outbound Messages - Engine releases held messages on commit completion

This flow exercises the complete X Platform stack including messaging, state management, persistence, cluster replication, consensus protocol, threading, and serialization.

Key Metrics

The benchmark reports two primary metrics:

Wire-to-Wire (w2w) Latency

• Measures time from inbound message arrival to outbound message transmission

• Reported as 50th, 99th, and 99.9th percentiles

• Includes all processing, persistence, and replication overhead

• Measured in microseconds (µs)

Maximum Throughput

• Measures messages processed per second under saturated load

• Tests the platform's ability to handle high-volume scenarios

• Measured in messages per second

Test Methodology

The benchmark is designed to provide:

• Reproducibility - Consistent hardware, software configuration, and test parameters

• Relevance - Tests real-world clustered microservice patterns

• Transparency - Full disclosure of test configuration and methodology

• Comparability - Consistent methodology across releases enables direct comparison

Results Organization

Performance results are organized by X Platform release. Each release page includes:

• Complete latency and throughput results

• Performance analysis and characteristics

• Tuning recommendations

• Comparisons with previous releases (where applicable)

Next Steps

• Test Description - Detailed test methodology and configuration

• Test Results - View performance results by release

• Benchmark Suite - Full benchmark suite documentation