SpringOne 2008 - Spring Transaction choices for Performance by Jürgen Höller

Tune with the @Transactional annotation:

• propagation: "requires", "requires-new" or, the spring-specific, "nested" (=uses save points)
  
• isolation level: default: read committed
  
• set the readonly flag --> hint for runtime optimization.

Prefer native JDBC transactions over XA transactions:

• XA is difficult to setup

run a transaction coordinator

XA JDBC driver


XA Message Broker

put the XA recovery log to a reliable log storage

• XA has a significant run time overhead

two phase commit

state tracking

recovery

on restart: complete pending commits/rollbacks --> read the "reliable recovery log"

Check if you really need XA! Prefer the use of a native transaction or combine two native transaction, with some small extra safety provisions. E. g. Usually the "exactly once" guarantee of an XA JMS can be relaxed --> use a native JMS transaction and detect duplicate messages. --> much higher throughput.