Performance Impact of Microservices Granularity: An Evaluation with the Service Weaver Framework

• Ricardo César Mendonça Filho UNIFOR
• Nabor C. Mendonça UNIFOR

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbrc.2024.1453

Abstract

The Service Weaver framework enables the development of distributed applications in Go as modular monoliths, with the flexibility to deploy monolith components in different environments and at various levels of granularity without code changes. This work evaluates the performance of an open-source microservice application using Service Weaver, considering multiple service granularities in environments of one and two virtual machines under various workloads. The results indicate that service decoupling, while beneficial to modularity and maintenance, can significantly increase communication overhead between processes and virtual machines, negatively affecting the application’s performance and scalability. These findings highlight the importance of balancing service granularity and communication costs in the design and deployment of microservices applications.

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