Measuring Performance of Spring

Spring is a widely used framework on JVM based programming languages to enable rapid application development. Spring is built on top Inversion of Control (IoC) principle which minimizes errors introduced during development and provides customizability, extensibility and flexibility for the applications being developed.

As of writing this, Spring offers a wide range of sub modules/projects from simple Jdbc Templates to advanced Cloud deployments. With the emergence of Spring Boot, the microservices framework of Spring, the usage for Spring skyrocketted and popularity to learn and use Spring Boot is ever so high today.

But the ultimate question remained for years was that, how one can improve the performance of Spring Boot applications so that they have very low latency when it comes to load up. This post looks at some ways that can be used to optimize a Spring Boot application so that it runs faster.

Spring was designed to be lightweight by default and Pivtoal engineering team for Spring cares deeply about performance as of now Spring Boot, HTTP: starts in under 1 second and uses less than 10 Mb of Heap. But following steps can be used to increase performance,

• Classpath exclusions from Spring Boot web starters (spring-boot-starter-json, spring-boot-starter-logging, org.hibernate.validator:hibernate-validator, spring-boot-starter-actuator can be excluded)
• Use the spring-context-indexer
• Don’t use actuators if you can afford not to
• Use Spring Boot 2.1 and Spring 5.1
• Use explicit spring.config.location
• Switch off JMX: spring.jmx.enabled=false
• Make bean definitions lazy by default
• Unpack the fat jar and run with an explicit classpath
• Run the JVM with -noverify. Also consider -XX:TieredStopAtLevel=1
• Use functional bean definition
• Build a native image

Furthermore, Lazy loading of Beans and subsystems can be used to further improve performance;

• Spring Data @EnableJpaRepositories(bootstrapMode=BootstrapMode.LAZY) or spring.data.jpa.repositories.bootstrap-mode=lazy BeanFactoryPostProcessor that switches all beans to lazy=true
• Look carefully at custom beans with expensive @PostConstruct
• Profiling with AspectJ

Use for example the Lazy Loading Actuator like below to break the application into modules and initialize each one separately on demand.

    org.springframework.boot.experimental
    spring-boot-lazy-actuator
    1.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT

Finally use tools to measure the peformance to further improve;

• Benchmarks: JMH
• Profiling: async-profiler
• GC pressure: JMC a.k.a. Flight Controller
• Classpath manipulation: Thin Launcher

References

• https://www.infoq.com/presentations/spring-framework-slow

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