WebSocket Performance

The charts were measured before the bundled Beast headers were removed. Standalone HTTP/WebSocket results apply only to that measured revision; current builds use Boost.

Local Results

Release local loopback: 1024-byte binary messages, 16 clients, window 16 and no extra application computation.

WebSocket

• Four contexts/one thread each has the highest throughput median for both dependency combinations.
• Standalone’s lowest p99 median belongs to four contexts/one thread each; Boost’s belongs to two contexts/one thread each, whose run range overlaps four contexts/one thread each.
• With one client and window 1, one context/four threads has lower throughput medians than one context/one thread for both dependency combinations.

WSS

• Four contexts/one thread each has the highest throughput median and lowest p99 median for both dependency combinations.
• WSS has lower throughput medians than plaintext WebSocket at the same load and thread model.

Complete WebSocket report · Complete WSS report

Test environment · Metrics and statistics

Payload, batch and execution comparisons · WSS comparison

Reproduce the IO Comparison

Build from the repository root with Boost. With Visual Studio, add --config Release to the build command and run the executable under benchmarks/Release/. Windows executables end in .exe.

cmake -S . -B build-perf -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DARKNET_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=ON -DARKNET_ENABLE_SSL=OFF \
  -DARKNET_USE_BOOST_ASIO=ON
cmake --build build-perf --target arknet_loopback_benchmark --parallel 3
build-perf/benchmarks/arknet_loopback_benchmark \
  --protocol websocket --payload 1024 --clients 16 --window 16 \
  --io-model shared --io-threads 1 --work 0 --warmup 0.25 --seconds 1

This configuration uses 1024-byte binary messages, 16 clients, window 16 and one context/one thread, writing JSON to standard output. Repeat each configuration three times in fresh processes. Change --io-threads to 2 or 4 for a shared context, or use --io-model sharded --io-threads 4 for four contexts/one thread each. --work 10000 adds 10,000 deterministic iterations per server echo; 0 adds no application computation. The complete shell matrix is in Testing. One connection remains serialized; see IO models for workload choices.

Enable TLS

Use --protocol wss --certs tests/certs in a TLS-enabled build. WSS verifies test certificates; see the WSS report for results and TLS performance for the build commands.

This test measures binary echoes after upgrade, excluding browser scheduling, upgrade rate, idle connections, compression, ping/pong, authentication, fan-out and slow peers. The dependency combinations use different Asio/Beast versions, so differences cannot be attributed solely to dependency selection.

See testing, WebSocket tests and benchmark source.