Spring Boot Pet Clinic App: A Performance Study

Spring pet clinic application is a sample application developed by the Spring Framework developers to demonstrate the capabilities of Spring Boot, Spring MVC, and Spring Data Framework. We set out to conduct a performance test on this application and see whether we can identify any performance bottlenecks.

Environment Setup

We cloned the Spring pet clinic application’s official Github repository and followed instructions to build a JAR file. Once the JAR file was ready, we launched the application on http://localhost:8080.

jcmd, Circa JDK 11

Nicolas Fränkel recently published a survey of command-line tools delivered with OpenJDK 11 in the blog post "OpenJDK 11, tools of the trade." In that post, he briefly summarizes the tools jps (a JVM process status tool), jinfo (JVM configuration details), jmap (classes/objects on the heap), jstack (thread analysis), and graphical tool JConsole (monitor Java applications).

All of these tools are handy for Java developers to be aware of to apply as needed and Fränkel's post provides a nice introductory overview for those new to these tools. In recent years, I've moved toward applying the single jcmd tool instead of most of the other command-line tools (though it doesn't replace graphical tool JConsole in any way) as I've discussed in the post " jcmd: One JDK Command-Line Tool to Rule Them All."