jonathannaguin / spring_webflux_ssl_issue

Description

This project shows a performance issue when using SSL with a Spring Webflux service with Reactor Netty.

Running the service

Create a Boot JAR first.

$ ./gradlew bootJar  

Build the Docker image.

$ docker build -t demo . 

And run it.

$ docker run -p 8081:8081 --cpus=1 --memory=2g -e SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=dev demo

Performance test

On another shell, run Gatling, you can change the URL and the number of requests per seconds you want to achieve with Gatling.

$ URL=https://localhost:8081 REQUEST_PER_SECOND=100 ./gradlew gatlingRun 

The issue

• The application.yml contains configuration for SSL with a self-signed certificate.
• If SSL is disabled, the service is able to handle 150 requests per seconds without any issues.
• When SSL is enabled, the Gatling test will fail after a few seconds with plenty of SSL handshake errors.
• In order to get a clean run with SSL, we would need to lower the number of requests per second to 50.

NOTE: Numbers can vary slightly depending on your machine.