amethyst/relayBench

relayBench

Head-to-head benchmark for Nostr relay implementations. Boots each relay as a real external process on loopback under an equivalent setup — persistent storage, signature verification on, no auth, stock limits — replays the same event corpus into each, and renders a side-by-side report.

./relayBench/run.sh                 # geode vs strfry, 10k-event synthetic corpus
./relayBench/run.sh --quick         # 2k-event smoke run
./relayBench/run.sh --real          # replay the checked-in real-event dump (2024, ~30k events)

run.sh builds :geode:installDist and the harness, and resolves strfry from $STRFRY_BIN, the PATH, or by building it from source into relayBench/.cache/ (first run only). SKIP_STRFRY=1 / SKIP_GEODE=1 skip a side.

What is measured

Ingest — receipt ➜ queryable. One connection publishes an event; from the same instant a second connection hammer-polls REQ {"ids":[id]} until the event comes back. This measures exactly "how long after the relay receives an event can a REQ return it", which is not the same thing as the OK ack — the report also shows OK latency and what fraction of events were already queryable when their OK arrived.

Ingest — throughput. The corpus is replayed over N connections (default 4) with a bounded number of unacked EVENTs in flight, wall-clocked from first send to last OK. Accepted/rejected counts come from the OKs.

Queries. Filters modeled on what real clients send, derived from the corpus itself so they hit meaningful data: global feed, profile hydration, home feed (150 follows), hottest thread, notifications for the most-mentioned pubkey, hashtag feed, 100-id batch fetch, recent time window. Each runs warmup + measured rounds on one connection (time-to-first-event / time-to-EOSE percentiles) and then from 8 connections at once (aggregate events/second). All filters stay inside strfry's default limits, and the number of events each relay returns is cross-checked — a ⚠ in the report means the relays disagree about the result set, which invalidates the speed comparison for that row.

NIP-77 negentropy sync — every pair of relays. Both sides get an 80% slice of the corpus (60% overlap); the harness plays the strfry sync role with one side's dataset as its local set and measures: initial reconciliation against each relay as server (time, NEG-MSG rounds, wire bytes), the delta transfer to convergence, and the steady-state reconcile of identical sets. Convergence is verified, so this doubles as an interop test.

Storage. On-disk footprint after full ingest (LMDB vs SQLite vs whatever).

Corpora

The corpus is the controlled variable: every relay sees the same events in the same order, and reports carry a fingerprint (sha256 over event ids) so two runs are comparable only when fingerprints match.

source	flag	notes
synthetic (default)	--events N --seed S	Deterministic to the byte: seeded keys, fixed timestamps, seed-derived BIP-340 nonces. Same spec ⇒ identical NDJSON on any machine. Zipf-popularity authors, threads, reactions, reposts, zap pairs, hashtags.
real dump	--real	The quartz test fixture nostr_vitor_startup_data.json.gz — ~31k unique real events from 2024 with a rich kind mix (notes, chats, DMs, zaps, reports, communities).
contact lists	--corpus contact-lists.gz --limit 100000 --max-event-bytes 1048576 --max-tags 20000	2.1M real kind-3 contact lists (heavy events, ~1.3 kB avg, up to 100+ kB). Grab it with pip install gdown && gdown 1yyC93xY9sDsEsa351ZAMhtAXwBUh3LYT. Raising the size/tag caps reconfigures strfry to match, so both relays still accept the full stream.
any dump	--corpus FILE	NDJSON or a single JSON array, gzipped or plain (sniffed by magic bytes).
fresh download	--download [urls]	Pages recent events out of public relays (damus/nos.lol/primal by default).

Every source goes through the same preparation: dedup by id, drop unsigned events (NIP-17 rumors), kind-5 deletions and ephemerals (order-dependent or unqueryable — they would make relays disagree for reasons unrelated to performance), drop events over the size/tag caps, verify every Schnorr signature in parallel, sort chronologically. The prepared corpus is cached in relayBench/.corpus-cache/ as NDJSON next to a manifest.json with the fingerprint and kind histogram — that file pair is a shareable, citable benchmark artifact.

Why this corpus matters: there is no de-facto community benchmark corpus today. Existing relay benchmarks (rnostr's and privkeyio's nostr-bench, mattn's scripts) each synthesize their own events with unspecified distributions, so published numbers aren't reproducible corpus-controlled; the only shared dataset (Wellorder's early-1m) is frozen in January 2023. relayBench's synthetic spec ("seed 1, n=10000, v1" ⇒ byte-identical corpus) and manifest/fingerprint convention are designed so other relay authors can run the exact same workload and publish comparable numbers.

Feature parity: NIP-50 search

geode maintains a NIP-50 full-text index by default; strfry has no search at all. That skews the ingest comparison — geode tokenizes every searchable event into the FTS index (~a quarter of its write cost) for a feature strfry isn't providing. --geode-no-search runs geode with --no-search (no FTS index, NIP-11 stops advertising 50) for the apples-to-apples write path:

./relayBench/run.sh --geode-no-search          # geode(no NIP-50) vs strfry

To see the price of search inline, run both geode flavors side by side:

GEODE=geode/build/install/geode/bin/geode
./relayBench/run.sh --geode-no-search \
    --relay "geode-fts=$GEODE --host 127.0.0.1 --port {port} --db {dir}/geode.sqlite"

Adding another relay

No code needed if the relay can be launched from a command line:

./relayBench/run.sh --relay 'nostr-rs-relay=/usr/bin/nostr-rs-relay --db {dir} --port {port}'

{port} and {dir} are substituted at launch; the process must listen on 127.0.0.1:{port} with persistent storage under {dir}, verification on and no auth. If the relay needs a config file, point the template at a small wrapper script that writes one (see StrfryRelay in relays/RelayUnderTest.kt for the pattern — adding a first-class subclass is ~20 lines).

Output

The terminal report shows each metric as name / bar / value rows with the winner starred, followed by a head-to-head summary. Every run also writes:

• relayBench/results/<timestamp>/report.md — shareable Markdown
• relayBench/results/<timestamp>/results.json — raw numbers for tooling

Direct harness invocation

run.sh is a thin wrapper; the harness itself is relayBench/build/install/relaybench/bin/relaybench — see --help for all options (--samples, --publishers, --window, --query-rounds, --query-conns, --no-sync, --out, --keep-data, …).