Nesquic is a testing infrastructure for QUIC libraries. It leverages eBPF to monitor library-internal QUIC components, like for example cryptography, or I/O. This allows the user to compare different design choices, find bottlenecks and improve the performance of their QUIC library.
Nesquic provides multiple QUIC client and server implementations (see status for supported libraries), as well as a set of testing regimes to evaluate them. It leverages Mahimahi to emulate realistic network conditions during the test, and eBPF to collect library-internal metrics. Nesquic then generates a Grafana dashboard with the results.
First, install Mahimahi, along with some other Nesquic dependencies:
sudo apt install -y apache2-bin apache2-dev cmake libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev libnuma-dev libxcb-present-dev dnsmasq-base protobuf-compiler ssl-cert libssl-dev binutils-dev libpcap-dev
git clone https://github.com/ravinet/mahimahi
cd mahimahi
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..
rm -rf mahimahi
cargo install --locked uv
Next, install libbpf and bpftool from source.
Then, generate a new vmlinux file as follows:
bpftool btf dump file /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux format c > include/vmlinux.h
Now you can run a performance test as follows:
# sanity check that all client and server implementations work
cargo test
# start the metric collection services (prometheus and grafana)
docker compose -f docker/backend.yml up -d
# run the test scenarios for a given library
script/run.sh quinn quiche
This starts the Grafana dashboard and executes a performance test. The dashboard is hosted at http://localhost:3000
During development, it might be practical to use the following environment variables:
export NQ_LIBS="quinn quiche"
export PR_PUSH_GATEWAY="http://localhost:9091"
To reset the Grafana dashboard, simply remove the nesquic_grafana_data volume:
docker compose -f docker/backend.yml down
docker volume rm nesquic_grafana_data
| Library | Status |
|---|---|
| Quinn | ✅ |
| Quiche | ✅ |
| MsQuic | WIP |