Spring Web Flux - The Non Blocking Asynchronous Functional Reactive Web Framework - 2

Spring Web Flux Framework can be used with its latest Release Candidate Release 5.0.0.RC3 if you want to try it out. You just need to add the Spring Milestone Repository in your gradle or maven file.

	<groupId>lk.techtalks</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-webflux-test</artifactId>
	<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
	<dependencies>
	<dependency>
	<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
	<version>5.0.0.RC3</version>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
	<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-webflux</artifactId>
	<version>5.0.0.RC3</version>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
	<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
	<version>2.0.0.M3</version>
	</dependency>
	</dependencies>
	<repositories>
	<repository>
	<id>spring-milestones</id>
	<name>Spring Milestones</name>
	<url>https://repo.spring.io/libs-milestone</url>
	<snapshots>
	<enabled>false</enabled>
	</snapshots>
	</repository>
	</repositories>

view raw pom.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I have written the following service which emulates a delay of maximum 1000 milliseconds in a service to test how the conventional Spring Web MVC vs Spring Web Flux work.

	@Service
	public class PersonService {
	private final List<Person> PEOPLE = new ArrayList<>();
	{
	PEOPLE.add(new Person("Shazin"));
	PEOPLE.add(new Person("Shahim"));
	PEOPLE.add(new Person("Shuhail"));
	PEOPLE.add(new Person("Shuhaib"));
	PEOPLE.add(new Person("Athiyab"));
	PEOPLE.add(new Person("Athif"));
	}
	public List<Person> getPeople() {
	try {
	Thread.sleep(new Random(System.currentTimeMillis()).nextInt(1000));
	} catch (InterruptedException e) {
	e.printStackTrace();
	}
	return Collections.unmodifiableList(PEOPLE);
	}
	}

view raw PersonService.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub

And the following controller implementations one with a Blocking conventional Spring Web MVC Controller method which returns a list to get people and a Non Blocking Spring Web Flux Controller method which returns a Flux> which is a defferred result and processed differently.

	@RestController
	@RequestMapping("/people")
	public class PeopleController {
	@Autowired
	private PersonService blockingService;
	@GetMapping
	public Flux<Person> getPeople() {
	return Flux.fromIterable(blockingService.getPeople());
	}
	@GetMapping("/blocking")
	public List<Person> getPeopleBlocking() {
	return blockingService.getPeople();
	}
	}

view raw PeopleController.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub

And Tested sending 1000 concurrent requests to both methods using a Gatling test. The Application was running inside of a Tomcat Container.

Spring Web MVC results were

And Spring Web Flux results were

If you compare the 99th Percentile, Max and Mean response times of the both results you can see Spring Web Flux is considerably faster without any code changes to improve performance. This is a promising sign. The numbers can be improved even more if we use the Netty Reactive Servers instead of conventional Tomcat servers in my understanding.