Roshan Naik and Sapin Amin have Storm 1.0 benchmarks on a small cluster:
Numbers suggest that Storm has come a long way in terms of performance but it still has room go faster. Here are some of the broad areas that should improve performance in future:
An effort to rewrite much of Storm’s Clojure code in Java is underway. Profiling has shown many hotspots in Clojure code.
Better scheduling of workers. Yahoo is experimenting with a Load Aware Scheduler for Storm to be smarter about the way in which topologies are scheduled on the cluster.
Based on microbenchmarking and discussions with other Storm developers there appears potential for streamlining the internal queueing for faster message transfer.
Operator coalescing (executing consecutive spouts/bolts in a single thread when possible) is another area that reduces intertask messaging and improve throughput.
Even with these potential improvements, Storm has come a long way—their benchmarks show around 5x throughput and a tiny fraction of the latency of Storm 0.9.1.