Skip to content

PERFORMANCE.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
28 lines (21 loc) · 1.56 KB

PERFORMANCE.md

File metadata and controls

28 lines (21 loc) · 1.56 KB

Astraea Performance Benchmark (Release)

Analysis of overhead introduced by the Astraea security engine during file system operations.

Environment

  • Platform: Android (Termux)
  • Engine: Astraea (Rust/Zig, ReleaseFast)
  • Runtime: Node.js
  • Operation: fs.readFileSync (10,000 iterations)

Results

Mode Total Time (10k ops) Avg Time per Op
Native (No Astraea) 160ms 0.0160ms
Astraea Enabled 520ms 0.0520ms
Overhead 360ms 0.0360ms

Analysis

The benchmark measures the round-trip cost of intercepting a libuv file system call, performing V8 stack introspection to attribute the call to a specific JavaScript module, and evaluating the request against the Radix Tree policy engine.

Overhead Breakdown

  • Attribution (High Cost): V8 stack introspection requires capturing the current stack, iterating frames, and extracting script names. This is the primary contributor to the ~36µs overhead.
  • Policy Evaluation (Low Cost): The Rust-based Radix Tree is extremely efficient, typically completing lookups in sub-microsecond time.
  • FFI Boundary (Minimal): The transition between Zig (Interceptor) and Rust (Engine) is highly optimized.

Conclusion

An overhead of ~0.036ms (36µs) per I/O call is negligible for the vast majority of Node.js applications, where I/O latency (disk/network) is typically measured in milliseconds. Astraea provides strong security guarantees with a performance impact that is effectively invisible in real-world scenarios.