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Alexander Petrov
Alexander Petrov

Reputation: 9492

Spring in memory data grid application

Is it sensible to use Spring in the server side of an in memory data grid based application?

My gut feeling tells me that it is nonsense in a low latency high performance system. A colleague of mine is insisting on including Spring in it. What are the pros and cons of such inclusion?

My position is that Spring is OK to be used in the client but it is too heavy for the server, it brings too many dependancies and is one more leaky abstraction to think of.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 385

Answers (2)

Sebastian Łaskawiec
Sebastian Łaskawiec

Reputation: 2737

Data Grid systems are memory and I/O intensive in general. Using Spring does not affect that (you may argue that Spring creates a lot of beans but with proper Garbage Collection tuning this is not a problem).

On the other hand using Spring (or any other DI) helps you structure and test your code.

So if you are using implementing some sort of server based on Data Grid systems, pay attention to properly adjusting GC, sockets in your OS (memory buffers and socket memories). Those will give you much more benefits than cutting down DI.

Upvotes: 3

dturanski
dturanski

Reputation: 1723

First, I'm surprised by the "leaky abstraction" comment. I've never heard anyone criticize Spring for this. In fact, it's just the opposite. Spring removes the implementation details of infrastructure such as data grids from your application code and provides a consistent and familiar programming model, allowing you to focus on business logic. Spring does a lot to enhance configuration and access to data grids, especially Gemfire, and generally does not create any runtime overhead per se. During initialization of a Spring application, Spring uses tools like reflection and AOP internally which may increase the start up time of an application, but this has no impact on runtime performance. Spring has been proven in many high-throughput, low-latency production applications. In extreme cases, things like network latency and serialization, concerns external to Spring, are normally the biggest factors affecting performance.

"Spring brings in too many dependencies" is a common complaint, but is a fallacy. I would say Spring brings in the exact right amount of dependencies for what it needs to do. Additionally, Spring Boot starters and the platform BOM do a lot to simplify dependency management so you don't need to worry about version incompatibilities or explicitly declaring common dependencies. I'll have to side with your colleague on this one.

Upvotes: 1

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