I'm looking to contrast Tibco rv and Hessian in terms of performance - for a Java application.
Any pointer to get me started appreciated. thanks.
Depends what you mean by "performance".
I have had a lot of Tibco experience but no Hessian so I can only comment of the RV side of things.
RV makes very efficient (and I mean VERY efficient) use of network and server resouces, it makes extensive use of TCP/IP broadcast to avoid sending the same message to n clients. Additionally messages are not sent directly to clients but to an end point on machine which then forwards the message to any clients logged on to the machine.
Additionaly the core product is several years old and was designed to run on what was considered quite modest harware circa 1995 ( single processer 200 mhz 256MB memory SparcStation would have been typical for the server end! ) so on todays hardware it can handle a vast volume of messages while sitting twoards the bottom of the "top" list.
There are a couple of downsides (compared with say Webshpere MQ); transactional support is limited and not up to MQ or database standards plus there is no built in guarenteed delivery or "dead letter" processing, although its fairly easy to code around this in an application.