Slow performance spring.io flow from ActiveMQ to OracleAQ with XA - spring-integration

Question

I have a Spring integration flow which bridges from ActiveMQ to OracleAQ.
See example project under GitHub - https://github.com/cknzl2014/springio-ora-xa/tree/atomikos.
When I run it without XA, it is blazingly fast.
With XA, it processes only 1 to 2 messages per second.
When profiling the application, I see that for every message a new physical connection is established, and with this, the metadata query is issued on the oracle db.
But I don't understand why it does this, and how I can prevent this from happening.
Does anyone of you guys have experience with OracleAQ and XA?
Could this be a problem with the XA transaction manager (I use Atomikos)?
Thanks for your help,
Chris

Answer 1

We found a solution to the problem.
It consists of four steps.
Step 1: Use the latest Oracle client libraries
The first step ist to use the lastest Oracle 12c client libraries.
There were significant improvements in the ojdbc8.jar, e.g. they use stored procedures to get the metadata now.
This increased the throughput to about 10 msgs/s.
Step 2: Setup connection pooling correctly
The second step was improving the connection pooling according to article http://thinkfunctional.blogspot.ch/2012/05/atomikos-and-oracle-aq-pooling-problem.html:
<bean id="oraXaDataSource" primary="true"
class="oracle.jdbc.xa.client.OracleXADataSource" destroy-method="close">
<property name="URL" value="${oracle.url}" />
<property name="user" value="${oracle.username}" />
<property name="password" value="${oracle.password}" />
</bean>
<bean id="atomikosOraclaDataSource"
class="org.springframework.boot.jta.atomikos.AtomikosDataSourceBean">
<property name="uniqueResourceName" value="xaOracleAQ" />
<property name="xaDataSource" ref="oraXaDataSource" />
<property name="poolSize" value="5" />
</bean>
<bean id="OracleAQConnectionFactory" class="oracle.jms.AQjmsFactory" factory-method="getConnectionFactory">
<constructor-arg ref="atomikosOraclaDataSource" />
</bean>
This configuration alone resultet in exceptions because of 'auto-commit' of the Oracle connection.
Step 3: Set autoCommit to false
The third step was to set the following java system property (see https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/JAJDB/oracle/jdbc/OracleConnection.html#CONNECTION_PROPERTY_AUTOCOMMIT):
-DautoCommit=false
But then the throughput went down to 1 to 2 msg/s again.
Step 4: Set oracle.jdbc.autoCommitSpecCompliant to false
The last step was to set the following java system property (see https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/JAJDB/oracle/jdbc/OracleConnection.html#CONNECTION_PROPERTY_AUTO_COMMIT_SPEC_COMPLIANT):
-Doracle.jdbc.autoCommitSpecCompliant=false
Now we get a throughput of 80 msgs/s.
Conclusion
The setting of oracle.jdbc.autoCommitSpecCompliant to false is not elegant, but solved the problem.
We have to investigate further to see how we can get around this problem without setting oracle.jdbc.autoCommitSpecCompliant to false.
Many thanks to Dani Steinmann (stonie) for the help!
P.S.: I updated the sample project under GitHub - https://github.com/cknzl2014/springio-ora-xa/tree/atomikos.

Answer 2

First of all you should be sure that you use pool for JDBC connections.
On the other hand you may consider to use ChainedTransactionManager isntead of XA for two target transaction managers - JMS and JDBC.
Also see some information in the JDBC extensions project.
There is also some Oracle AQ API as well in that project.