If you're considering replacing SmartSockets™ with LBM, be aware that it can be done as part of a software evaluation with no risk. Converting SmartSockets applications to LBM is not complicated. It generally takes under a month and consists of the following stages:
Conduct a binary evaluation to set a baseline of LBM performance on your network. Use the documentation, including the source code for the binary performance tools, to familiarize yourself with the LBM API.
Examine your application and identify all SmartSockets API calls. Many developers have had good success abstracting these calls into a separate application sub-layer. There is no need to write a completely general abstraction layer that maps every SmartSockets feature to the corresponding LBM feature; designing an abstraction layer that is specific to your application's needs is much simpler and generally takes less than a week. This concentrates the SmartSockets-specific code into a relatively short and uncomplicated module, which can be tested prior to the introduction of LBM. Then an equivalent LBM-specific layer can be written and swapped in. Past experience suggests that the equivalent LBM layer can be written in about a week.
For publish/subscribe applications, choose the appropriate LBM transport for each topic. For latency-sensitive applications, we recommend LBT-RM, which provides latency-bounded reliable multicast. This provides better performance and network stability than SmartSockets transports (TCP and PGM).
For high-bandwidth applications, topics can be assigned to multiple transport sessions, either manually or automatically, to reduce CPU load and improve network utilization.
LBM offers many configurable options that allow fine-tuning its performance for the characteristics of your application and network. This is typically performed after the code is functionally working. 29West provides extensive support to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and address them.
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