How do I use JMS efficiently

Reusing expensive objects

JMS is designed for high performance. In particular its design is such that you are meant to create a number of objects up front on the startup of your application and then resuse them throughout your application. e.g. its a good idea to create upfront and then reuse the following

• Connection
• Session
• MessageProducer
• MessageConsumer

The reason is that each create & destroy of the above objects typically requires an individual request & response with the JMS broker to ensure it worked. e.g. creating a connection, session, producer, then sending a message, then closing everything down again - could result in 7 request-responses with the server!

Note a little trick - you can reuse the same MessageProducer for sending messages to different destinations; just create it with a null destination and specify it on the send method.

Other performance tips

Also see

• Should I use transactions
• Should I use XA

Client side versus Server side

Using pure JMS on the client side is fine. However in server side applications (such as services consuming requests from a queue), if you wish to consume messages fast and efficiently you should use JCA Java Connector Architecture.

JCA supports the pooling of JMS connections & sessions and MessageListeners, parallel message processing efficiently as well as thread pooling and transaction & exception handling. Also JCA will work with any JMS provider with a JCA Resource Adapter.

Typically JCA is used in a J2EE container via MDBs; though there is a POJO Spring based JCA Container you can use, which is simple and lightweight and easy to embed inside Tomcat or any J2SE application.