Better QUIC implementations with

Nesquic is a testing infrastructure for QUIC libraries. It leverages eBPF to monitor library-internal QUIC components, like for example cryptography, or I/O. This allows the user to compare different design choices, find bottlenecks and improve the performance of their QUIC library.

Nesquic provides multiple QUIC client and server implementations (see status for supported libraries), as well as a set of testing regimes to evaluate them. It leverages Mahimahi to emulate realistic network conditions during the test, and eBPF to collect library-internal metrics. Nesquic then generates a Grafana dashboard with the results.

Status

Library	Status
Quinn	✅
Quiche	✅
MsQuic	WIP
Neqo	WIP
noq	WIP

Getting Started

First, install Mahimahi, along with some other Nesquic dependencies:

sudo apt install -y apache2-bin apache2-dev cmake libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev libnuma-dev libxcb-present-dev dnsmasq-base protobuf-compiler ssl-cert libssl-dev binutils-dev libpcap-dev
git clone https://github.com/ravinet/mahimahi
cd mahimahi
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..
rm -rf mahimahi
cargo install --locked uv

Next, install libbpf and bpftool from source.

Then, generate a new vmlinux file as follows:

bpftool btf dump file /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux format c > include/vmlinux.h

For Neqo, the following additional dependencies are needed: libnss3. While the distributed versions are not up to date, the corresponding libraries need to be compiled manually. See below in Details: NSS Dependency.

Now you can run a performance test as follows:

# sanity check that all client and server implementations work within one library
cargo test -p nesquic --features quinn
cargo test -p nesquic --features quiche
cargo test -p nesquic --features neqo
cargo test -p nesquic --features noq
# start the metric collection services (InfluxDB and grafana)
docker compose -f docker/backend.yml up -d
# set up the dashboards
export NQ_LIBS="quinn quiche neqo"
script/dashboard.sh
# update run.sh to the correct CPU-range; if you are running a bare-metal
# benchmark, enable NESQUIC_BENACHMARK=1.
# run the test scenarios for a given library
# the label can be used later to identify past runs. If no value is supplied,
# the label is set to "default".
NESQUIC_RUN_LABEL=firstRun script/run.sh quinn quiche

This starts the Grafana dashboard and executes a performance test. The dashboard is hosted at http://localhost:3000

During development, it might be practical to use the following environment variables:

export NQ_LIBS="quinn quiche"
export PR_PUSH_GATEWAY="http://localhost:9091"

To reset the Grafana dashboard, simply remove the nesquic_grafana_data volume:

docker compose -f docker/backend.yml down
docker volume rm nesquic_grafana_data

Details: NSS Dependency

In order to create the static verion of Neqo's dependency libraries (NSS and NSPR), the following process which follows Neqo's README is used:

apt install ninja-build mercurial
uv tool install gyp-next
mkdir ~/neqo_dependencies
cd neqo_dependencies
hg clone https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/projects/nss
hg clone https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/projects/nspr
export NSS_DIR=$HOME/neqo_dependencies/nss
cd ~/nesquic
cargo build

# after first successful build, the source files for nss and nspr are not needed anymore
cd ~/nesquic
mkdir -p ~/nesquic/static_dependencies/neqo_dependencies
cp -r ~/neqo_depencencies/dist ~/nesquic/static_dependencies/neqo_dependencies/
mdkir -p ~/nesquic/static_dependencies/neqo_dependencies/nss
mdkir -p ~/nesquic/static_dependencies/neqo_dependencies/nspr
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(pwd)/static_dependencies/neqo_dependencies/dist/Release/lib
export NSS_DIR=$(pwd)/static_dependencies/neqo_dependencies/nss
export NSS_PREBUILT=1

# for running the custom built dependencies, need to install them first
cd ~/nesquic
echo "$(pwd)/static_dependencies/neqo_dependencies/dist/Release/lib" | sudo tee /etc/ld.so.conf.d/nesquic.conf
sudo ldconfig
ldconfig -p | grep static_dependencies/neqo_dependencies/dist/Release/lib/libnss3.so

NSS Database setup

The NSS Database is set up already and only needs to be changed if the cert changes.

Then, the following process should be used:

sudo apt isntall libnss3-tools
certutil -N -d res/nssdb
openssl pkcs12 -export -in res/pem/cert.pem -inkey res/pem/key.pem -out res/pkcs12/cert.p12 -name "nesquic"
certutil -N -d res/nssdb
pk12util -i res/pkcs12/cert.p12 -d res/nssdb
certutil -L -d nssdb
certutil -M -t "TC,C,C" -n nesquic -d nssdb
certutil -L -d nssdb