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Benchmarking LittleProxy

To understand the overhead and performance characteristics of LittleProxy compared with other proxies (and no proxy), we've developed a simple benchmark.

The goal of the benchmark is to understand LittleProxy's performance without network variability being a factor.

To that end, the test serves a local mirror of Wikipedia's [Germany] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany) page from a Jetty web server.

We use JMeter to generate load from the same machine as the Jetty server, thereby cutting out the network as a factor.

The JMeter test uses 4 concurrent threads to generate requests to [germany.html] (site/wikipedia/germany.html). Each thread makes 200 consecutive requests with no delay in between. To simulate a normal browser, JMeter looks for resources referenced in the page and loads those with each page as well.

TODO - try adding in a delay and see if that makes Apache and node-http-proxy happier.

Methodology

Tests should always be run starting with a cold back-end, proxy and JMeter.

  1. Run ./perfServer.bash to start a test web server on port 9000 (Jetty)
  2. Start your proxy on port 8080 (for LittleProxy, ./run.bash)
  3. Open and run the [JMeter Germany Page Test] (jmeter/Local Wikipedia Germany Performance Test.jmx)
  4. To run without a proxy, edit "The Users" and remove the proxy settings at the bottom

Compared Proxies

node-http-proxy 0.10.3

Run using node-proxy.js.

Note - this is not a generic proxy, it is actually configured to proxy everything to the web server listening on port 9000.

Squid using SquidMan

Note - Squid is a caching proxy, but for these tests the cache was disabled.

Apache 2 mod_proxy

Server version: Apache/2.2.22 (Unix)
Server built:   Dec  9 2012 18:57:18

Configured with httpd.conf.

nginx 1.4.2

Installed per [these instructions] (http://learnaholic.me/2012/10/10/installing-nginx-in-mac-os-x-mountain-lion/).

Configured with nginx.conf.

Note - we are using a single worker process

Results

This section lists historical results from running the benchmark.

About the Tables

The columns "Avg", "Min", "Max" and "Std Dev" refer to response time in ms.

The column "Error %" indicates the percent of pages that had some error. Even if only one image failed to load, the entire page is considered to be in error.

August 29, 2013

Environment

Machine:          MacBook Air 2013
OS:               OS X 10.8.4
Processor:        1.7 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory:           8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Network Adapter:  Virtual Loopback Interface

Measurements

Proxy Avg Min Max Std Dev Error % Pages/s MB/s
No Proxy 181 96 547 66 0 13.9 35.8
LittleProxy 263 113 778 88 0 11.0 28.6
Squid 299 121 702 104 0 9.9 25.8
node-http-proxy* 70 11 808 126 88 29.7* 9.5
Apache 2* 542 7 20120 1928 42 4.7 7.4
nginx 1246 129 18206 3155 4 2.8 7.2

* - These tests had very high error rates due to network-related issues, so take their numbers with a big grain of salt.

Apache 2 ran fine for several iterations and then started reporting lots of errors like this:

[Thu Aug 29 09:35:17 2013] [error] (49)Can't assign requested address: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:9000 (*) failed

node-http-proxy similarly ran fine for a while and then started reporting this:

An error has occurred: {"code":"EADDRNOTAVAIL","errno":"EADDRNOTAVAIL","syscall":"connect"}

I tried changing both to bind on 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost, but that didn't help. I'm not sure if they're leaking file descriptors or what's going on.