performance

Pre-Alpha. This page describes behavior that may change.

ze-perf is a BGP propagation latency benchmark tool. It measures how long it takes for BGP UPDATE messages to propagate through a device under test (DUT) by establishing sender and receiver sessions, injecting routes from the sender, and timing their arrival at the receiver. The tool produces per-route latency distributions, convergence times, and throughput numbers.

Subcommands

run

Run a benchmark against a BGP DUT. The sender establishes a BGP session with the DUT and injects a set of routes. The receiver establishes a separate session and measures how long each route takes to arrive. Multiple iterations are run and the results are aggregated.

ze-perf run --dut-addr 172.31.0.2 --dut-asn 65000
ze-perf run --dut-addr 172.31.0.2 --dut-asn 65000 --routes 10000 --json
ze-perf run --dut-addr 172.31.0.2 --dut-asn 65000 --family ipv6/unicast
ze-perf run --dut-addr 172.31.0.2 --dut-asn 65000 --force-mp --repeat 10

report

Generate a comparison report from one or more result JSON files. Supports Markdown tables (default), self-contained HTML, and full documentation with methodology disclaimers.

ze-perf report result-ze.json result-gobgp.json
ze-perf report --html result-ze.json result-gobgp.json > report.html
ze-perf report --doc result-*.json > docs/performance.md

track

Track performance history over time from an NDJSON file and detect regressions. In --check mode, exits non-zero if any metric has regressed beyond the configured threshold.

ze-perf track history.ndjson
ze-perf track --check history.ndjson
ze-perf track --html history.ndjson > trend.html
ze-perf track --check --threshold-convergence 15 history.ndjson

Key flags for run

Flag	Default	Purpose
--dut-addr	(required)	DUT BGP address.
--dut-asn	(required)	DUT autonomous system number.
--dut-port	179	DUT BGP port.
--dut-name	unknown	DUT implementation name (for reports).
--dut-version		DUT version string (for reports).
--sender-addr	127.0.0.1	Sender local address.
--sender-asn	65001	Sender autonomous system number.
--receiver-addr	127.0.0.2	Receiver local address.
--receiver-asn	65002	Receiver autonomous system number.
--routes	1000	Number of routes to inject.
--family	ipv4/unicast	Address family (ipv4/unicast or ipv6/unicast).
--force-mp	false	Force MP_REACH_NLRI encoding for IPv4 unicast.
--seed	0 (random)	Deterministic PRNG seed for route generation.
--repeat	5	Number of benchmark iterations.
--warmup-runs	1	Warmup iterations (discarded from results).
--warmup	2s	Delay after session establishment before injecting.
--duration	60s	Maximum time to wait for convergence per iteration.
--batch-size	0 (auto)	NLRIs per UPDATE message (0 = auto-max within 4096 bytes).
--passive-listen	false	Listen on port 179 for inbound DUT connections (requires root).
--json	false	JSON output.
--output		Write JSON results to file (implies --json).

Make targets

make ze-perf          # Build the ze-perf binary
make ze-perf-bench    # Run a benchmark against the local Ze instance
make ze-perf-report   # Generate a comparison report from result files
make ze-perf-track    # Check history for regressions

Docker test infrastructure

The test/perf/ directory contains the Docker-based benchmark infrastructure. It includes DUT configurations, run scripts (run.py), and a results/ directory for storing benchmark output. The Docker setup launches Ze (and optionally other implementations) in containers with isolated networking so that benchmarks are reproducible across machines.

See also

• Testing for the full test suite overview.
• Building for the Make targets that produce the binaries.