Method Input Parameters and Performance of EJB Applications

We investigated the impact of method input parameters on component performance, which is usually neglected during an application design stage. We evaluated a set of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components which use Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) technology. These components were deployed on WebSphere Application Server and tested using a custom-built remote client. The client keeps track of execution times, while the server has JProbe Profiler embedded in the EJB container to monitor the interactions. For test purposes we used only stateless session beans, allowing us to concentrate on the possible dependency of server performance on input parameter variations. Test results show that significant performance impacts can be caused by a relatively small number of input parameter dependencies.