Introduction

Welcome to the Xylem documentation!

Xylem is a high-performance and modular traffic generator and measurement tool designed for RPC workloads. It provides a flexible framework for benchmarking and load testing distributed systems with different combinations of application protocols (e.g., Redis, HTTP, Memcached) and transport protocols (e.g., TCP, UDP, Unix Domain Socket).

Key Features

• Multi-Protocol Support: Built-in support for Redis, HTTP, Memcached, Masstree, and xylem-echo protocols
• Flexible Transport Layer: Support for TCP, UDP, and Unix Domain Sockets
• High Performance: Efficient event-driven architecture for generating high loads
• Reproducible: Configuration-first design using TOML profiles ensures reproducibility
• Detailed Metrics: Latency measurements and statistics using various sketch algorithms
• Multi-Threaded: Support for thread affinity and multi-threaded workload generation

Use Cases

Xylem is ideal for:

• Performance Benchmarking: Measure the performance of your RPC services under various load conditions
• Load Testing: Generate realistic traffic patterns to test system behavior under stress
• Latency Analysis: Collect detailed latency statistics to identify performance bottlenecks
• Protocol Testing: Validate protocol implementations across different transport layers
• Capacity Planning: Determine the maximum throughput and optimal configuration for your services

Project Status

Xylem is actively developed and maintained. The project is licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0.

Getting Help

• GitHub Issues: Report bugs or request features at github.com/minhuw/xylem/issues
• Source Code: View the source code at github.com/minhuw/xylem

Next Steps

• Follow the Quick Start guide
• Learn about CLI Reference
• Explore the Architecture to understand Xylem’s design