Caliper Introduction

Caliper is a blockchain performance benchmark framework, which allows users to test different blockchain solutions with predefined use cases, and get a set of performance test results.

Currently supported blockchain solutions:

• fabric 1.0.5
• sawtooth 0.8
• Iroha (develop branch @fcc2f7c8ceaee4f7654c3b216d65b8906a35f633)

Currently supported performance indicators:

• Success rate
• Transaction/Read throughput
• Transaction/Read latency(minimum, maximum, average, percentile)
• Resource consumption (CPU, Memory, Network IO,...)

See [to add the link to PSWG] to find out the definitions and corresponding measurement methods.

##Achitecture See Architecture introduction.

Build

Pre-requisites

Make sure following tools are installed

• NodeJS 8.X
• node-gyp
• Docker
• Docker-compose

Run npm install in caliper folder to install dependencies locally

Install blockchain SDKs

• Fabric

  • Install with source code
    • Clone fabric-sdk-node and run the headless tests to make sure everything is ok
    • Install fabric-client and fabric-ca-client from the SDK, e.g run npm install path-to-sdk/fabric-client path-to-sdk/fabric-ca-client in caliper's root folder, or just copy the node_modules from fabric-sdk-node project
  • Or install using the repository
    • run npm install fabric-ca-client fabric-client in the root folder

• Sawtooth

  • Clone sawtooth-core and run the ./bin/run_tests -m javascript_sdk to test the SDK
  • Install sawtooth-sdk from the SDK, e.g run npm install path-to-sdk/javascript in capliper's root folder.

• Iroha

  • Install dependencies

    $sudo apt-get install libv8-dev 
    $install google-protobuf grpc
    

  • A precompiled Iroha library is provided in src/iroha/external, which is compiled with Ubuntu 14 x86_64. The library should be replaced if it is incompatible with the under platform.

Run benchmark

All predefined benchmarks can be found in caliper/benchmark folder. To start a benchmark, just run node main.js -c yourconfig.json -n yournetwork.json in the folder of the benchmark.

• -c : specify the config file of the benchmark, if not used, config.json will be used as default.
• -n : specify the config file of the blockchain network under test. If not used, the file address must be specified in the benchmak config file.

# start the simple benchmark, default config.json is used
cd ~/caliper/benchmark/simple
node main.js

Some example SUTs are provided in caliper/network folder, they can be launched automatically before the test by setting the bootstrap commands in the configuration file, e.g

{
  "command" : {
    "start": "docker-compose -f network/fabric/simplenetwork/docker-compose.yaml up -d",
    "end" : "docker-compose -f network/fabric/simplenetwork/docker-compose.yaml down;docker rm $(docker ps -aq)"
  }
}

The scripts defined in command.start will be called before the test, and the scripts defined in command.end will be called after the finish of all tests. You can use them to define any preparation or clean-up works.

You can also run the test with your own blockchain network, a network configuration should be provided and corresponding file path should be specified in configuration file's blockchain.config.

Note:

• When running the benchmark, one or more blockchain clients will be used to generate and submit transactions to the SUT. The number of launched clients as well as testing workload can be defined using the configuration file.
• A HTML report will be generated automatically after the testing.

Alternative

You can also use npm scripts to run a benchmark.

• npm run list: list all available benchmarks

$ npm run list

> caliper@0.1.0 list /home/hurf/caliper
> node ./scripts/list.js

Available benchmarks:
drm
simple

• npm test: run a benchmark with specific config files

$ npm test -- simple -c ./benchmark/simple/config.json -n ./benchmark/simple/fabric.json

> caliper@0.1.0 test /home/hurf/caliper
> node ./scripts/test.js "simple" "-c" "./benchmark/simple/config.json" "-n" "./benchmark/simple/fabric.json"
......

Run benchmark with distributed clients (experimental)

In this way, multiple clients can be launched on distributed hosts to run the same benchmark.

1. Start the ZooKeeper service

2. Launch clients on target machines separately by running node ./src/comm/client/zoo-client.js zookeeper-server or npm run startclient -- zookeeper-server . Time synchronization between target machines should be executed before launching the clients.

   Example:

   $ npm run startclient -- 10.229.42.159:2181
   
   > caliper@0.1.0 startclient /home/hurf/caliper
   > node ./src/comm/client/zoo-client.js "10.229.42.159:2181"
   
   Connected to ZooKeeper
   Created client node:/caliper/clients/client_1514532063571_0000000006
   Created receiving queue at:/caliper/client_1514532063571_0000000006_in
   Created sending queue at:/caliper/client_1514532063571_0000000006_out
   Waiting for messages at:/caliper/client_1514532063571_0000000006_in......

3. Modify the client type setting in configuration file to 'zookeeper'.

   Example:

   "clients": {
     "type": "zookeeper",
     "zoo" : {
       "server": "10.229.42.159:2181",
       "clientsPerHost": 5
     }
   }
   

4. Launch the benchmark on any machine as usual.

Note:

• Zookeeper is used to register clients and exchange messages. A launched client will add a new znode under /caliper/clients/. The benchmark checks the directory to learn how many clients are there, and assign tasks to each client according to the workload.
• There is no automatic time synchronization between the clients. You should manually synchronize time between target machines, for example using 'ntpdate'.
• The blockchain configuration file must exist on machines which run the client, and the relative path (relative to the caliper folder) of the file must be identical. All referenced files in the configuration must also exist.

Write your own benchmarks

Caliper provides a set of nodejs NBIs (North Bound Interfaces) for applications to interact with backend blockchain system. Check the src/comm/blockchain.js to learn about the NBIs. Multiple Adaptors are implemented to translate the NBIs to different blockchain protocols. So developers can write a benchmark once, and run it with different blockchain systems.

Generally speaking, to write a new caliper benchmark, you need to:

• Write smart contracts for systems you want to test
• Write a testing flow using caliper NBIs. Caliper provides a default benchmark engine, which is pluggable and configurable to integrate new tests easily. For more details, please refer to Benchmark Engine .
• Write a configuration file to define the backend network and benchmark arguments.

Directory Structure

Directory	Description
/benchmark	Samples of the blockchain benchmarks
/docs	Documents
/network	Boot configuration files used to deploy some predefined blockchain network under test.
/src	Souce code of the framework
/src/contract	Smart contracts for different blockchain systems