Monitoring I2P performance

There has been some competion coming up. Welcome! Facts speak for themselves. We will have a post about network performance later and now give you a tool for comparing CPU-specific figures. Context switches, CPU usage, time slices, length of thread activation runs, TCP packet loss, we have it all.

Bash script developed on Debian Linux. Others will most likely need to adapt. Run on your current install, save figures, update to I2Speed and compare.

I2P performance can only be measured after the router has integrated into the network for some time. Synthetic tests do not work, they may stumble over bugs or software limits.

Sample output at around 4000 tunnels, 2,500 KBps throughput, 8 core ARM 32, seeding lots of torrents (24 hours uptime recommended):

CPU 419 %  TCP Retransmissons 16 ‰

            Ctx switches/sec    CPU ms/s timeslice us   activ us

Thread Pool  vol  nvol total   run  wait   run  wait   run  wait

BuildExec      6     3     8    35     4  4149   480  6080   704

BuildHand      4    32    36   205    12  5616   318 48311  2735

DH_Precal      1     7     8    66     3  7999   411 85394  4392

G1_Conc_0      0     2     2    69     1 29395   242687846  5658

GC_Thread     10     2    13    62     7  4922   563  5999   687

I2CP_Inte     20     0    20     3     4   143   220   143   220

I2CP_Read     45     0    46    17     7   364   162   364   162

I2CP_Writ     35     0    35     5     6   132   174   132   174

JobQueue_    859   303  1161  1570   186  1352   160  1828   217

NTCP_Pump    598   211   809   671    43   830    54  1124    73

PRNG           1     5     6    26     3  4333   439 32074  3247

SimpleTim      1     0     2     3     0  1797   244  2384   324

UDP_Estab      9    14    23    86     6  3772   269  9800   698

UDP_Messa    370    93   463   596    73  1288   158  1611   198

UDP_packe    231    98   329   256    54   780   165  1111   235

UDPReceiv    415    66   481   239    77   497   160   576   186

XDH_Preca      1     3     4    20     2  4865   369 25239  1916

YK_Precal      1    13    14   192     5 13961   349285879  7148

How to read:

voluntary context switches (number of times a thread goes to sleep) and total context switches should be low
wait time is idle wait on the processor run queue, should be low
G1 Conc CPU should be lower than GC, otherwise you should allocate more memory or your I2P version wastes it
time slices: longer is better
activation runs: should be longer than 750 µs (minimum Linux time slice)

Please note that other I2P versions use shorter crypto keys on this hardware. That reduces their CPU usage mainly in YK Precalc and I2CP* (we have that in the JobQueue instead of I2CP*).

Questions welcome.

Updated 200316

<-- Back