Unix Domains Sockets vs Localhost TCP Sockets

Introduction

This project is a NodeJS client and server that benchmarks the efficiency benefits of Unix Domain Sockets over TCP Localhost sockets. More information about this project can be found here.

Running the benchmark

This benchmark application uses the Python taskrun library for running the various benchmarks. More information about taskrun can be found at https://github.com/nicmcd/taskrun.

Before running the benchmarks, the server must be started:

node server.js <tcp port> <domain socket path>

For simplicity sake, the taskrun file is hardcoded to TCP port 5555 and domain socket path /tmp/uds, so you should start your server with:

node server.js 5555 /tmp/uds

A single client benchmark can be run with:

node client.js <port or path> <packet size> <packet count>

To match the client with the aforementioned server startup, run:

node client.js 5555 1000 100000

and

node client.js /tmp/uds 1000 100000

Running both of these commands should show that for 1k packets repeated 100,000 times, Unix domain sockets beat localhost TCP sockets by about 3x.

The full benchmark analysis is run with:

python run.py

This will take a significant amount of time to run. Mine took about a half hour. Go have fun and come back later.

Interpreting the results

The taskrun script generates a CSV file in the 'run' directory. Each benchmark point is run 10 times so it is best to average these. I used Microsoft Excel to import the CSV file and generate a graph. My benchmark was run on an Intel E5-2620 v2 processor running Ubuntu 13.10.