Performance Comparison and Evaluation of WebSocket Frameworks: Netty, Undertow, Vert.x, Grizzly and Jetty

The WebSocket protocol emerges to supersede existing bidirectional communication technologies that use HTTP as a transport layer. Currently, there are many network application frameworks that support the WebSocket protocol, but have different behaviors in performance of various aspects. To study and compare the performance of common WebSocket frameworks, say Netty, Undertow, Vert.x, Grizzly and Jetty, in this paper, we use concurrency test, flow test, connection test and resource occupancy test. The experiment results show that Netty and Undertow perform better in highly concurrent environments, while Grizzly is suitable for large flow conditions. The results also show that with persistent connection, Netty far outperforms other frameworks, and that Vert.x and Undertow can handle most requests within relatively shorter time. Besides, Netty and Vert.x occupy less CPU and memory resources in comparison with other frameworks.