springboot-virtual-thread-analysis

A demo Spring Boot project exploring the use of 'Virtual threads' in Java 21 to handle high-concurrency REST endpoints. This project benchmarks the performance differences between traditional servlet threads, platform threads, and virtual threads, particularly in data-fetching endpoints powered by Spring Data JPA and MySQL.

---

🔍 What are Virtual Threads?

Virtual threads are a major feature introduced in Java 21 as part of Project Loom. Unlike traditional platform threads, which are managed by the OS, virtual threads are managed by the JVM and are much lighter and more scalable.

✨ Key Features:

• Thousands of virtual threads can run concurrently with minimal memory footprint.
• Ideal for I/O-bound applications such as web servers or microservices.
• Virtual threads help reduce thread contention and simplify asynchronous programming without complex callback logic or CompletableFuture chains.

🔗 Read more: Java Virtual Threads – Official Docs

---

🚀 Running the Project

1. Clone the project:

   git clone https://github.com/your-username/springboot-virtual-thread-analysis.git
   cd springboot-virtual-thread-analysis

2. Make sure you are using Java 21+ , Maven 3.8+ and MySQL running with database named as 'test'

3. Run the application:

   mvn spring-boot:run

4. Access Swagger UI:

   • Open your browser and go to: 👉 http://localhost:9090/swagger-ui/index.html

   • 

5. Use the /reports/{region} endpoints by entering a region like "India" in Swagger.

---

📊 Results Summary

The application provides 3 different endpoints that internally execute the same logic but differ in the threading model used:

• /reports/India – Traditional (Baseline)
• /reports/platform/India – Uses platform threads explicitly
• /reports/virtual/India – Uses virtual threads (via Executors.newVirtualThreadPerTaskExecutor())

We used ApacheBench (ab.exe) to benchmark each endpoint under 1000 requests with a concurrency level of 50.

📈 Benchmark Comparison Table

Metric	/reports/India (Baseline)	/platform/India (Platform Thread)	/virtual/India (Virtual Thread)
Total Requests	1000	1000	1000
Concurrency Level	50	50	50
Test Duration (sec)	0.680	0.572	0.362
Requests/sec	1470.81	1746.88	2762.99
Mean Time/request (ms)	33.995	28.622	18.096
Time/request per thread (ms)	0.680	0.572	0.362
Transfer Rate (KB/s)	328.92	406.01	639.48
Median Latency (ms)	31	26	16
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	55	49	30
Max Latency (ms)	140	101	84

📌 Conclusion: Virtual threads significantly outperform both baseline and platform threads in terms of throughput and latency, demonstrating lower response times and higher request handling capacity under the same load.

---

📷 Benchmark Chart

---

🧰 Tech Stack

• Java 21 (Virtual Threads)
• Spring Boot 3.5.x
• Spring Web & JPA
• MySQL
• ApacheBench for load testing
• Lombok
• Swagger (OpenAPI 3)

---

🙌 Acknowledgements

• Java Loom (OpenJDK)
• Spring Boot Team
• Apache HTTP Server Project (ab tool)