WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. The main goal is to enable high-performance applications on web pages, "but it does not make any Web-specific assumptions or provide Web-specific features, so it can be employed in other environments as well." It is an open standard and aims to support any language on any operating system, and in practice all of the most popular languages already have at least some level of support.
"WebAssembly, that defines a portable, size- and load-time-efficient format and execution model specifically designed to serve as a compilation target for the Web." - Luke Wagner
WasmEdge is a lightweight, high-performance, and extensible WebAssembly runtime for cloud native, edge, and decentralized applications.
This project provides an End-to-End code to test an application that uses WasmEdge runtime in Kubernetes.
The following table shows the sample taken from the 95 percentile values of a single execution, those values can vary.
| Metric Name | Description | Rust | Wasm |
|---|---|---|---|
| http_req_blocked | Time spent blocked (waiting for a free TCP connection slot) before initiating the request. | 5.18ms | 460.62µs |
| http_req_connecting | Time spent establishing TCP connection to the remote host. | 5.13ms | 387.23µs |
| http_req_receiving | Time spent receiving response data from the remote host. | 6.36ms | 413.08µs |
| http_req_sending | Time spent sending data to the remote host. | 2.86ms | 246.45µs |
| http_req_waiting | Time spent waiting for response from remote host (a.k.a. “time to first byte”, or “TTFB”). | 28.56ms | 69.13ms |
Surprisingly, the waiting time for response in WASM is longer than Rust.
The Vagrant tool can be used for provisioning an Ubuntu Focal Virtual Machine. It's highly recommended to use the setup.sh script of the bootstrap-vagrant project for installing Vagrant dependencies and plugins required for this project. That script supports two Virtualization providers (Libvirt and VirtualBox) which are determine by the PROVIDER environment variable.
curl -fsSL http://bit.ly/initVagrant | PROVIDER=libvirt bash
Once Vagrant is installed, it's possible to provision a Virtual Machine using the following instructions:
vagrant up
The provisioning process will take some time to install all dependencies required by this project and perform a Kubernetes deployment on it.