SSL RAM Overhead Testing

This project is intended to make it relatively easy to run and compare Websocket servers with a variety of languages/libraries/frameworks with and without SSL encryption. The intent is to more clearly document the RAM overhead per connection to determine minimum server requirements for handling large amounts of connections, as well as see if some SSL handling is more efficient RAM-wise than other languages/stacks.

Project Layout

LANGUAGE/
    STACK/
        README.txt
        run

It's not feasible to have a generic way to setup each stack, so each one to be tested should include its own README.txt indicating how its environment should be setup within its directory, and a run script/project that the tester will run.

Run Program

The run script/project in each directory will be called with the current working directory set to its directory, it's output will be monitored and the tester will connect clients after output is not emitted for several seconds.

It will be called for two runs, one with SSL, and one without. The program should use SSL when the USE_SSL environment variable is set to true.

Setting up the Tester

The tester is a Python script with a Python websocket test client. To setup the tester a Python 2.7 virtualenv should be used, and tester/requirements.txt should be installed in it.

For example:

$ virtualenv myenv
$ export PATH=`pwd`/myenv/bin:$PATH
$ pip install -r tester/requirements.txt
$ . ./myenv/bin/activate

Running the Tester

The tester can be run with a language/stack that was setup per its README.txt, for example if we've already setup the Python/autobahn-twisted project:

$ ./tester/run_test Python/autobahn-twisted

After the script runs, results will be saved to the results/ directory.