JniPing vs. JnaPing
As described in the previous article we have build an OpenNMS Horizon Core component from source.
If you don’t do anything else, it will uses an ICMP implementation using Java Native Access (JNA).
The big benefit here, it’s all Java and supports IPv4 and IPv6.
You also don’t need additional permissions on your Linux system such as net.ipv4.ping_group_range and SELinux.
It makes it perfect for local development and also if you want to run OpenNMS on exotic architectures where you can’t easily compile or build the JNI equivalent written in C from the source code.
The downside it comes with some overhead for each ICMP service test.
You can see the effect on the latency measurements, especially on very fast responding IP addresses, such as the local loopack interface.