ActionCable-Anycable-Benchmark

Summary

This application shows the difference between actioncable and anycable results in websocket programming.

Key findings

1. Anycable is better than actioncable when its comes to performance and memory allocation.
2. Actioncable with iodine is better than actioncable in performance and memory allocation (but not good as anycable).
3. Tsung is a load testing tool. It provides functionality to load the app with simultaneous user connection. It is developed in Erlang. Please gone through tsung.xml for input file.

limitations

1. Actioncable 20k concurrent requests take 3.5 GB memory.
2. Anycable 20k cocurrent requests take 800 MB memory.

Anycable

Comparison between the Options

Features	Actioncable	Anycable	Actioncable with Iodine
Compatibility	Compatible for Ruby >= 2.2.2	Compatible for Ruby > 2.5	Compatible for Ruby >= 2.2.2
Performance	20k idle clients == 3.5 GB memory RAM usage	20k idle clients == 800 MB memory RAM usage	20k idle clients == 1.5 GB memory RAM usage
Deployment	fayesocket as websocket server	anycable-go as websocket server	iodine as websocket server
Simplicity of use	Easy to debug and use	we need to debug into gRPC server
Github link	https://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/actioncable	https://github.com/anycable/anycable-rails	https://github.com/boazsegev/iodine

Setup to run the app

RAILS_ENV=production bin/setup
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile
curl -Lo bin/anycable-go https://github.com/anycable/anycable-go/releases/download/v0.6.0/anycable-go-v0.6.0-linux-amd64 && \
  chmod +x bin/anycable-go

Tsung setup for MAC OS 10+

1. brew install tsung.
2. sudo cpan Template.
3. For ubuntu please refer this link ubuntu tsung
4. To increase file limits refer this link file-limits

Common problem while setup

1. ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor::InvalidMessage error

• Please remove config/master.key credentials.yml.enc
• Execute EDITOR="mate --wait" bin/rails credentials:edit

2. Tsung is not working.

• Make sure you have set the limit of file descriptors as per your machine OS.

Start the bench application

Foreman is used in order to ease processes management with Procfiles.

Start with ActionCable as Websocket server

foreman start -e .env.production,.env.actioncable -f Procfile.actioncable

Start with AnyCable as Websocket server

foreman start -e .env.production,.env.anycable -f Procfile.anycable

Start with Iodine as Websocket server

foreman start -e .env.production,.env.actioncable_iodine -f Procfile.actioncable_iodine

Start the test suite

tsung -f tsung.xml -k start

This will run runtime reporting on localhost:8091

Reference

1. https://docs.anycable.io/v06/#/
2. https://anycable.io/
3. https://github.com/anycable/anycable-rails
4. https://www.thegreatcodeadventure.com/load-testing-rails-5-action-cable-with-tsung/
5. https://nebulab.it/blog/actioncable-vs-anycable-fight/
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cKtKxKzu68
7. https://www.slideshare.net/TokyoIncidents/what-is-rack-hijacking-api-69807904
8. https://github.com/boazsegev/iodine
9. https://medium.com/@plezi_io/how-actioncable-broke-puma-fcfeceac33b0

Notes

1. Make sure your socket connection is working with anycable(cable.yml).
2. Benchmarking reporting is done with single threaded development machine It may vary in production.