Benchmarks

[zamazan4ik]

Hi!

A few days ago, I read about ntpd-rs on Hacker news - thanks a lot for developing the project!

In the comments, I found several questions about performance. Do you have any kind of test suite and ready-to-use benchmarking scenario for the project? We want to evaluate the ntpd-rs performance and get some numbers. Also having a benchmark test suite will be helpful for tracking the project's performance change over time. Maybe starting with regular cargo bench-based benchmarks would be a good option.

Thanks!

[rnijveld]

What kind of performance benchmarks would you be looking at? Time synchronization benchmarks need to happen over a long period of time, and require a specific networking setup under test, so they're unlikely to happen under a cargo bench scenario.

As for performance in the sense of 'how much can it handle', we don't really have those kinds of numbers. For the client setup, it makes little sense to do any serious benchmarks, given the low amount of operations (i.e. only a couple of dozen packets being sent/received per hour at most) happening on all but the most extreme setups (i.e. synchronizing against thousands of different servers).

For servers, benchmarks might make sense, but we don't have any testing setup for that right now. What I can tell you is that we have two servers running in the NTP pool. They run on shared core instances on Google Cloud (e2-micro). They are able to handle hundreds of requests per second with barely any CPU or memory usage.