WStream - WebSocket Streams

WStream offers a simple and high-performance WebSocket stream built on top of Kestrel. It targets .NET Standard 2.0, as well as .NET Core 3.1 and above.

Use Cases:

• Server-to-Server communication.
• Sending binary data through web proxies like Cloudflare.
• Building custom protocols.
• Writing micro websocket servers without boilerplate.

Wow, that sounds great! How do I use WStream?

Usage

WStream offers three main constructs, WsClient, WsServer and WsStream.

Note

For versions of .NET Core 3.1 and above, the ASP.NET Core runtime has to be installed.

Here is a simple example of a ping program built in WStream.

// create the server
var server = new WsServer();
await server.StartAsync(new IPEndPoint(IPAddress.Any, 8080), async stream =>
{
    // called when a client connects
    await stream.WriteAsync(BitConverter.GetBytes(DateTime.Now.ToBinary()));
    await stream.CloseAsync();
});

// start client
var client = new WsClient();
var connection = await client.ConnectAsync(new Uri("ws://localhost:8080"));
// read data
var binReader = new BinaryReader(connection);
Console.WriteLine($"Current time is {DateTime.FromBinary(binReader.ReadInt64())}");

// cleanup
client.Dispose();
server.Dispose();

Performance

All benchmarks (prior to .NET 8) are run on a Windows 10 machine with an Intel i7-6700K CPU and 32GB of RAM, running on Release. Each test sends 5 gigabytes of data over the loopback connection.

The .NET 8 benchmarks are run on a Windows 11 machine with an Ryzen 9 7900x CPU with 64GB of RAM. (Thus the results cannot be compared across the two tables)

The results vary depending on the version of .NET used. Here are the results of the benchmarks, sorted in descending throughput:

.NET Version	Packet Size	Packets Per Second	Throughput
.NET 8.0.0	262,144	6,192.41 msg/s	1,623.26 MB/s
.NET 8.0.0	65,536	23,675.68 msg/s	1,551.61 MB/s
.NET 8.0.0	131,072	9,302.29 msg/s	1,219.27 MB/s
.NET 8.0.0	8,192	82,673.11 msg/s	677.26 MB/s

.NET Version	Packet Size	Packets Per Second	Throughput
.NET 6.0.0-rtm.21522.10	131,072	6,389.41 msg/s	837.47 MB/s
.NET 5.0.11	65,536	12,769.34 msg/s	836.85 MB/s
.NET Core 3.1.21	65,536	12,328.76 msg/s	807.98 MB/s
.NET 6.0.0-rtm.21522.10	65,536	12,270.52 msg/s	804.16 MB/s
.NET 5.0.11	131,072	6,021.29 msg/s	789.22 MB/s
.NET Core 3.1.21	131,072	6,051.64 msg/s	793.20 MB/s
.NET Core 3.1.21	262,144	2,944.58 msg/s	771.88 MB/s
.NET 5.0.11	262,144	2,905.69 msg/s	761.69 MB/s
.NET 6.0.0-rtm.21522.10	262,144	2,841.93 msg/s	744.97 MB/s
.NET 6.0.0-rtm.21522.10	8,192	78,116.06 msg/s	639.93 MB/s
.NET 5.0.11	8,192	71,034.53 msg/s	581.91 MB/s
.NET Core 3.1.21	8,192	62,709.79 msg/s	513.72 MB/s
.NET Framework 4.8.4420.0	131,072	1,094.11 msg/s	143.41 MB/s
.NET Framework 4.8.4420.0	262,144	527.24 msg/s	138.21 MB/s
.NET Framework 4.8.4420.0	65,536	2,097.67 msg/s	137.47 MB/s
.NET Framework 4.8.4420.0	8,192	14,423.41 msg/s	118.16 MB/s

Results may fluctuate based on CPU Usage, GC, and other variables. These numbers are based on a single run.