Ecosystem and Community

Ecosystem and Community

In short

YABS is a single bash file, but it sits inside a much larger ecosystem: the hosting forums where it was born and where results are shared daily, the public iperf3 servers donated by providers, the result databases that ingest its JSON, a public usage dashboard, and a steady stream of third-party guides. This page maps that ecosystem and points you to the places where YABS results are discussed and compared.

Forums

YABS grew out of the "low-end" hosting communities and they remain its home. Posting a YABS result when reviewing a VPS is a near-universal convention there.

Community	Role	Key threads
LowEndTalk (lowendtalk.com)	The largest hosting forum; the original 7 Oct 2019 announcement; thousands of threads with YABS output in reviews and offers	Announcement thread (160627) · Understanding & Interpreting Benchmarks / YABS (183625) · VPS Benchmark Scripts (162132)
LowEndSpirit (lowendspirit.com)	Where the fio test was designed in public (Jan 2020); home of the canonical results thread	Announcement / design thread (466) · Post some YABS bench here (592) — the "OCD Benchmarking Thread" started by cybertech in Feb 2020, with a posting format (provider, plan, location, price, date) · YABS website (2713)
HostBalls (hostballs.com)	Same-day announcement (7 Oct 2019); early bug reports (noexec /tmp, dd caching debate)	Announcement thread (3099)
LowEndBox (lowendbox.com)	Blog/deal site paired with LowEndTalk; tutorials and polls about YABS; operates ServerVerify	How To Use YABS To Check Your New VPS Or Dedicated Server (Jun 2022) · "POLL: Should We Require YABS for LowEndBox / LowEndTalk Offers?"
Reddit (r/selfhosted, r/homelab, r/VPS), OTLand, Chinese-language hosting forums (hostloc and others)	Secondary; YABS is routinely recommended alongside bench.sh	—

Etiquette that has emerged in these threads: wrap output in code tags, say which provider/plan/price, mention the date and whether the VM was fresh, and do not present a single run as proof of anything (see Benchmarks Are Snapshots).

Result databases (JSON consumers)

Since August 2022 YABS can POST its JSON to any URL with -s. These sites accept it and let you browse, compare and chart results. Uploading is strictly opt-in — nothing is sent unless you pass -s.

Site	Upload command	What it offers
YABSdb	curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -s "https://yabsdb.com/add"	Public database of YABS runs searchable by provider/CPU
VPSBenchmarks	curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -s https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/yabs/upload	Calls each run a "yab"; free upload, visualisation, comparison and private/public management; also accepts pasted text output; runs its own longer "Private Trials"
serverlist.dev	curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -s "https://serverlist.dev/api/v1/yabs/submit"	Provider/plan directory with attached benchmarks
ServerVerify (LowEndBox)	account required	LowEndBox's benchmark database; passed 10,000 YABS submissions; used to verify providers' claims in offers
VPS Host Review	curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -s "https://vpshostreview.com/yabs"	Review site with benchmark submissions (added Sep 2026)

Several URLs can be given at once, comma-separated. The JSON schema these sites depend on is documented in JSON Output and Integrations and is treated as a public contract (additive changes only).

Independent aggregators also scrape forum posts (for example HostTopPicks' benchmark library), and the Geekbench Browser itself is a comparison database for the CPU portion.

Public iperf3 servers

The network test depends entirely on servers donated by hosting companies and network operators. The current list (Clouvider London and Los Angeles, Eranium Amsterdam, Uztelecom Tashkent, Leaseweb Singapore and New York, Edgoo São Paulo) is maintained in yabs.sh and documented on Tests: Network (iperf3), along with the history of servers that came and went (Bouygues, Online.net, Severius, Worldstream, wilhelm.tel, Biznet, Hostkey, Vultr, Velocity Online, Airstream, Hurricane Electric, Scaleway, Hybula, Telia, WebHorizon and others).

Running thousands of 10-second, 8-stream tests a day against someone else's server is a real cost, which is why the maintainer is reluctant to grow the list, prefers one-for-one swaps, and why -r exists. Providers who want to offer a server are welcome to open an issue; users who need a specific location can use -p without touching the shared list.

Usage statistics

stats.yabs.sh (launched 4 July 2026; source at masonr/yabs-stats) publishes how often the script is fetched. It is deliberately minimal: a GitHub Actions job queries Cloudflare's analytics for the yabs.sh redirect, merges the data into a static JSON file committed to the repo, and GitHub Pages serves a dashboard. No servers, no database, no telemetry inside the script — a "run" is simply a request that would have received the script.

As of 31 October 2026 the dashboard reports about 2.7 million runs since 4 July 2025, roughly 90,000 in the last 30 days and 19,000 in the last 7 days, with daily country breakdowns. For scale: in June 2020 the first day over 200 runs was celebrated on LowEndSpirit.

Result assessment tool

stats.yabs.sh/assess (added November 2026, same repository) is the companion to Interpreting Results: paste a YABS result (plain text or -j JSON) and it applies that page's checks — storage-class fingerprint, cache and QoS plateau signatures, nearest-server port check, Geekbench landmarks and multi/single scaling, and context caveats such as fresh VMs, containers and the ZFS warning — reporting each finding with a link back to the wiki section it came from. Optionally tell it the storage type and port speed you were sold and it judges against those. In keeping with the script's "report, don't judge" principle, verdicts are phrased as "consistent with…" rather than grades, and every result carries the one-run-is-one-sample caveat. It is static JavaScript served by GitHub Pages: nothing is uploaded and the Network Information block (IP, ISP, location) is ignored.

Third-party guides and articles

These are useful additional data points, written independently of the project. None is authoritative about how YABS works — the code is — but several are good at interpretation:

• LowEndBox — "How To Use YABS To Check Your New VPS Or Dedicated Server" (Not_Oles, June 2022): a walkthrough on a Hetzner AX41-NVMe with a complete sample report; notes the "yet another"/yacc pun and the community's affection for the author.
• SSD Nodes — "How to benchmark a VPS properly" (2026): the best single guide to methodology; explains steal time, direct I/O, --time_based, why dd is not a disk benchmark, bandwidth-delay product, reference IOPS by storage class, and why one run is not a benchmark.
• IMIDC — "Server Benchmarking Guide 2026: How to Read bench.sh, YABS and fio Results": a provider knowledge-base article comparing the scripts and explaining 4k vs 1m.
• VPSBenchmarks — "Get Started with Yabs" / announcement posts: how to upload, with the honest caveat that "Yabs.sh results can easily be forged".
• HostFoundry — "How to Read a YABS Benchmark Report", xdhiru's Homelab & VPS Wiki, W3Space, and many hosting blogs: shorter explainers of each section.
• LowEndSpirit — "Parsing YABS output with awk" (11253): a practical example of turning several text reports into a comparison table.

Much of what those articles say about interpretation has been cross-checked and consolidated into Interpreting Results.

Derivative tools and integrations

• Forks (~560 on GitHub): localisations, provider-branded variants, versions with extra tests or different iperf servers. The main project encourages forks for anything outside its scope.
• Parsers for the text output (awk/Python) are common in forum threads and in provider tooling; the JSON output exists precisely so this is not necessary.
• Provider knowledge bases frequently embed the one-liner (for example VPS Aliens added it to their customer KB in Feb 2020; many providers since).
• Automation: cron-driven repeated runs with -w are a common pattern for monitoring a VPS over time (see Benchmarks Are Snapshots).

Getting help and contributing

• Bugs and feature requests: GitHub issues. Please include the full output and the -h dry-run output.
• Discussion and "is this result normal?": the LowEndTalk/LowEndSpirit threads above tend to answer within hours.
• Code: see Contributing for conventions and the testing checklist.

See also

• History
• JSON Output and Integrations
• Tests: Network (iperf3)
• Comparison with Other Bench Scripts
• Interpreting Results