Introduction to a WebSocket benchmarking infrastructure

The WebSocket protocol is a HTTP(S) based standard enabling full-duplex realtime communication between a web server and its clients, typically regular browser applications. The performance gain of this new standard is relevant compared to the classical XHR-based communication both on server and client side, but this topic has not been fully explored yet. In this paper we present a WebSocket benchmark infrastructure created for measuring server-side performance of the WebSocket protocol. This infrastructure enables black-box measurements independently of the server-side implementation. We also validate the presented infrastructure with 3 measurement scenarios using an industrially applied WebSocket implementation.