Accelerating Weblogic workloads with GraalVM EE

Setup GraalVM

Setup Weblogic Domain

Setup a Basic Weblogic 14.1.1 Domain using the following instructions The domain has one Administration server and two Managed instances wls

Deploy the benchmark Application

Clone and build the demo application from Github

cd  graalvm-weblogic-jaxrs-demo 
mvn clean install

Deploy the WAR on Managed instance wls_server_01

Run Benchmarks

The benchmark app we are running is a simple JAX-RS Web Service provided by
marthenlt. The source code is pretty simple and rely on Java Stream to compute and arithmetic expression.

Start the Admin server

cd $DOMAIN_ROOT/bin
./startWebLogic.sh

Weblogic with Oracle JDK 8

Edit the Managed server startup options in $DOMAIN_ROOT/bin/startManagedWebLogic.sh Add the following option

    export JAVA_OPTIONS="${JAVA_OPTIONS} -XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures -XX:+FlightRecorder -XX:StartFlightRecording=duration=300s,filename=/Users/nono/JFR/wls-server-jdk8.jfr"

Start the Server ./startManagedWebLogic.sh wls_server_01 http://localhost:7001

The server is listening on port 7003.

Run the benchmark 03 times

Test1:

 ./run-test.sh 
Testing with 200,000,000 (200 millions) iterations
Time taken to complete in milliseconds: 45187 ; and result is: 30000000000
real    0m45.251s
user    0m0.005s
sys     0m0.010s

Test2:

 /run-test.sh 
Testing with 200,000,000 (200 millions) iterations
Time taken to complete in milliseconds: 46254 ; and result is: 30000000000
real    0m46.274s
user    0m0.006s
sys     0m0.010s

Test3:

./run-test.sh
Testing with 200,000,000 (200 millions) iterations
Time taken to complete in milliseconds: 46418 ; and result is: 30000000000
real    0m46.431s
user    0m0.006s
sys     0m0.007s

Weblogic with GraalVM EE 21.0.0

After running the benchmarks with the default Java 8, we are now running the same test on the same server with GraalVM as Java Runtime. First stop the runninw wls_server_01 Managed instance

Duplicate the running script

cp startManagedWebLogic.sh startManagedWebLogicWithGraalVM.sh

Customize it with the following instructions Add the following line the $DOMAIN_ROOT/bin/startManagedWebLogicWithGraalVM.sh in order to include Flight Recorder.

    export JAVA_OPTIONS="${JAVA_OPTIONS} -XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures -XX:+FlightRecorder -XX:StartFlightRecording=duration=300s,filename=/Users/nono/JFR/wls-server-graalvm.jfr"

in $DOMAIN_ROOT/bin/setDomainEnv.sh set the GraalVM

    export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/graalvm-ce-java8-21.0.0/Contents/Home

Start the managed server

    .bin/startManagedWebLogicWithGraalVM.sh wls_server_01  http://localhost:7001

Confirm the server is running with GraalVM from logs.

Starting WLS with line:
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/graalvm-ce-java8-21.0.0/Contents/Home/bin/java -server ...

Run the same benchmark ( 200 millions ) iterations

Test1:

Testing with 200,000,000 (200 millions) iterations
Time taken to complete in milliseconds: 28973 ; and result is: 30000000000
real    0m29.038s
user    0m0.006s
sys     0m0.008s

Test2:

Testing with 200,000,000 (200 millions) iterations
Time taken to complete in milliseconds: 29592 ; and result is: 30000000000
real    0m29.606s
user    0m0.005s
sys     0m0.006s

Test3:

Testing with 200,000,000 (200 millions) iterations
Time taken to complete in milliseconds: 29627 ; and result is: 30000000000
real    0m29.641s
user    0m0.005s
sys     0m0.007s

29s in average with GraalVM vs 46s while running with GraalVM.

Flight Recorder Analysis

With Java Mission control or Visual VM or any tool of your choise, Open the JFR files and compare the CPU usage. With GraalVM the application with the bench load used around 0.1% CPU while the same workload was taking 3.6% CPU with JRE8.