Performance comparison of audit levels in SOA Suite 11g

I ran multiple tests to compare the performance of various audit level settings in Oracle SOA Suite 11g.

The two parameters tested are:

• Audit Level
• Capture Composite Instance State

To access these settings, log in to the EM console and navigate to SOA --> (right-click on) soa_server1 --> SOA Administration --> Common Properties.

Test #	Audit	Capture Composite Instance State	Min (ms)	Max (ms)	Avg (ms)
1	Off	n/a	27	519	50
2	Off	n/a	27	551	51
3	Off	n/a	27	325	49
4	Production	Disabled	77	825	128
5	Production	Disabled	63	420	104
6	Production	Disabled	62	697	108
7	Production	Enabled	75	475	153
8	Production	Enabled	85	649	149
9	Production	Enabled	82	1057	147

Results:

• Audit=Off yields the best performance
• Audit=Production is approximately 56% slower in performance than Audit=Off
• Setting CaptureCompositeInstanceState=Disabled yields an additional 24% performance improvement

Recommendations:

• Settings Audit=Development is unacceptable in a production environment due to the high performance overhead incurred
• Setting Audit=Off, despite the drastic performance improvement, is unacceptable since absolutely no metadata is logged in the database and you have zero visibility into your instances
• Set Audit=Production in a production environment
• Consider setting CaptureCompositeInstanceState=Disabled, as you obtain this data by querying the tables in the database
• Performing database tuning can improve performance of Audit=Production by at least 30%, so engage your DBAs

Applicable Versions:

• Oracle SOA Suite 11g (11.1.1.4)