Toolkit for Benchmarking Socket.io and Lightstreamer-Node

This toolkit can be used to do simple benchmarking of both Socket.io and Lightstreamer. The generated data can then be easily compared between the two solutions. The toolkit contains a javascript generator that connects respectively to a Socket.io server or to a Lightstreamer server, which, in turn, broadcasts the generated updates to Java clients over WebSockets.

A blog post detailing a benchmark run using this toolkit is available on the Lightstreamer blog

Requirements

This README assumes that Node.js and a JDK are already installed on the target machines and referenced in the global path.

Server

Required libs

• socket.io
• express.js
• socket.io-client
• lightstreamer-adapter

You can install everything using npm

npm install socket.io express socket.io-client lightstreamer-adapter

Run

The following instructions assumes everything is run on the same machine; configuration files need to be edited to run the various pieces on different machines. The suggested setup is to run the clients and the generator on a machine and the server on a different one; this will prevent you from having to deal with clock synchronization issues (as long as the clocks of a multi-core machine are synchronized themselves).

Lightstreamer

• Launch Lightstreamer server:
  • Install and configure the Lightstreamer server following its instructions: http://www.lightstreamer.com/download
  • Create a new folder in its adapters subfolder
  • Copy the adapters.xml file from server/conf/adapters.xml
  • Create a lib folder inside the new subfolder
  • Copy the ls-proxy-adapters.jar from the Lightstreamer distribution into it (you can find it under DOCS-SDKs/sdk_adapter_remoting_infrastructure/lib)
  • Start Lightstreamer
• Start the generator
  • From the server folder, run

node src/server ls ../conf/conf.js

Socket.io

• Launch Redis
  • Install and configure the Redis server following its instructions: http://redis.io/download
  • Start redis
• Launch the Socket.io server
  • From the server folder, run

node src/SocketIoServer ../conf/conf.js

• Start the generator
  • From the server folder, run

node src/server io ../conf/conf.js

Client

The clients used to run the load tests are not full-fledged clients of their respective servers but simple and minimal implementations based on netty.

Required libs

• netty-3.5.8.Final.jar

You can download netty from its website ( Netty ). The use of a newer or older version of the library may or may not result in a working client. In any case, if using a different version, update the jar name when necessary. Once downloaded, place it under a newly created lib folder under the client folder.

Compile

Create a classes folder in the client folder

From the client folder, run

javac -classpath ./lib/netty-3.5.8.Final.jar -d ./classes ./src/loadtestclient/*.java ./src/loadtestclient/client/*.java

Then go into the classes folder and run

jar cf ../lib/loadtestclient.jar ./loadtestclient

Run

From the client folder

• Launch Lightstreamer client: java -classpath ./lib/loadtestclient.jar;./lib/netty-3.5.8.Final.jar loadtestclient.NodeLoadTest ls ./conf/conf.properties

• Launch Socket.io client: java -classpath ./lib/loadtestclient.jar;./lib/netty-3.5.8.Final.jar loadtestclient.NodeLoadTest io ./conf/conf.properties

See Also

• Lightstreamer
• Node.js
• Socket.io
• Lightstreamer SDK for Node Adapters

Lightstreamer Compatibility Notes

Compatible with Lightstreamer Server since 5.0
Compatible with Adapter Remoting Infrastructure since 1.4.3
Compatible with Lightstreamer SDK for Node Adapters 1.0.0