OpenERP LAN vs Cloud Benchmark

Benchmarks with OpenERP server hosted on the Internet

As Akretion starts to host some OpenERP servers for its SMB customers, we want to propose them a solution that is both fast and secure. So far, the majority of our customers host the OpenERP server on their LAN and access it via the Gtk Client through the Net-RPC protocol. The Net-RPC protocol is fast but not secure : the passwords and all the data are sent in clear, but our customers consider that, as the connection is made over their LAN, it’s not a problem. By the way, it is probably a bad assumption, because a lot of IT attacks against companies come from the inside ! And when our customers need to access OpenERP from outside the office, they connect by VPN to their LAN and then they use OpenERP as usual with Gtk Client and Net-RPC protocol.
In order to select the best option for our customers that access an OpenERP server over the Internet, we made a real-life benchmark with an OpenERP server running on a machine in a datacenter, and elaborated a precise usage scenario. Basically, the scenario consist in a full purchase workflow (PO, reception of goods, supplier invoice) and a full sale workflow (SO, delivery order, customer invoice). For each protocol, we executed this scenario manually multiple times. We kept the fastest timing that was measured. As we ran the scenario manually, we estimate that the results are valid with a 10 seconds accuracy.

Bench with OpenERP server hosted on the Internet

	Net-RPC	Net-RPC inside SSH tunnel	XML-RPC	XML-RPC SSL	HTTP access with Firefox 7	HTTP access with Chrome 14	HTTPS access through an Nginx proxy with Chrome 14
Secure ?	no	yes	no	yes	no	no	yes
OpenERP 6.0.3	1 min 49	1 min 47	2 min 11	3 min 08	2 min 04	2 min 11	2 min 05
OpenERP 6.1 (trunk)	1 min 42	1 min 40	1 min 52	not available ?	buggy	1 min 43	1 min 40

Bench with an OpenERP server hosted on the LAN

	Net-RPC
OpenERP 6.0.3	1 min 15
OpenERP 6.1 (trunk)	1 min 08

Here is our analysis of the results of this benchmark :

• OpenERP 6.1 is faster than OpenERP 6.0, thanks to the optimisations in the code of the server and addons (and also thanks to an ergonomy improvement on invoice generation from delivery orders).
• XML-RPC SSL is not an option because it’s too slow. If you activate the debug logs on the OpenERP server, you will see that the SSL session is re-established for every request, which explains the bad performances.
• on OpenERP 6.0, Net-RPC is the fastest, but the Web interface is not too far behind : only 15% slower.
• on OpenERP 6.1, the Web interface is as fast as Net-RPC !

The developers of the new Web interface of OpenERP 6.1 made a great job ! Thumbs up !
As a conclusion, for those who plan to use an OpenERP server over the Internet, the best option is  to run version 6.1

Source : akretion