Announcing RTB, an open source real-time protocols benchmark tool
ProcessOne is excited today to announce the first release of RTB (Real-Time Benchmark), an open source benchmarking tool to stress-test real-time protocols. The aim of this project is to define an easy benchmark for XMPP and MQTT servers, with minimal configuration overhead.
Why
To compare server implementations and be sure they are ready for massive traffic, there is a need for a “golden standard” benchmarking tool that is easy to use and avoids ambiguity due to configuration or overhead — each test should have the same baseline and capabilities for the results to be comparable.
We believe RTB fits such a role, because it has sane defaults (gathered from statistics of real world servers) and is able to cover all the test features defined in the XMPP Compliance Suite 2018.
Status
RTB is in early stages of development: currently, only XMPP protocol is implemented, and support for Multi-User Chat (MUC) and Personal Eventing Protocol (PEP) is lacking.
However, “sane” defaults and what should be considered a “golden standard” for this benchmark is open for discussion with the XMPP community — we welcome issues and pull requests. The tool has already been battle-tested: we used RTB to stress test our ejabberd SaaS deployments with more than 2 000 000 concurrent connections.
RTB includes a script to populate your server’s database with user accounts and rosters, so it’s easy to create test pools. When you start a test with RTB, you can monitor a local website on port 8080 with live graphs like the one below:
Requirements
We want RTB to be straightforward and easy to deploy. Currently, only Unix-based operating systems are supported. To compile, you just need gcc, make, Erlang, expat, yaml, openssl, zlib and gnuplot. There’s a default YAML configuration file to get you started and only 5 mandatory parameters before you can lanuch your first benchmark.
RTB is available on GitHub under Apache License 2.0 and we are waiting for your feedback!
Originally published at blog.process-one.net on July 13, 2018.