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📖 Introduction

gnet is an event-driven networking framework that is fast and lightweight. It makes direct epoll and kqueue syscalls rather than using the standard Go net package and works in a similar manner as netty and libuv, which makes gnet achieve a much higher performance than Go net.

gnet is not designed to displace the standard Go net package, but to create a networking client/server framework for Go that performs on par with Redis and Haproxy for networking packets handling (although it does not limit itself to these areas), therefore, gnet is not as comprehensive as Go net, it only provides the core functionalities (by a concise API set) of a networking application and it is not planned on being a full-featured networking framework, as I think net has done a good enough job in this area.

gnet sells itself as a high-performance, lightweight, non-blocking, event-driven networking framework written in pure Go which works on the transport layer with TCP/UDP protocols and Unix Domain Socket, so it allows developers to implement their own protocols(HTTP, RPC, WebSocket, Redis, etc.) of application layer upon gnet for building diversified network applications, for instance, you get an HTTP Server or Web Framework if you implement HTTP protocol upon gnet while you have a Redis Server done with the implementation of Redis protocol upon gnet and so on.

gnet derives from the project: evio while having a much higher performance and more features.

🚀 Features

• High-performance event-loop under networking model of multiple threads/goroutines
• Built-in goroutine pool powered by the library ants
• Lock-free during the entire runtime
• Concise and easy-to-use APIs
• Efficient, reusable, and elastic memory buffer: (Elastic-)Ring-Buffer, Linked-List-Buffer and Elastic-Mixed-Buffer
• Supporting multiple protocols/IPC mechanisms: TCP, UDP, and Unix Domain Socket
• Supporting multiple load-balancing algorithms: Round-Robin, Source-Addr-Hash, and Least-Connections
• Supporting two event-driven mechanisms: epoll on Linux and kqueue on FreeBSD/DragonFly/Darwin
• Flexible ticker event
• Implementation of gnet Client
• Windows platform support (For compatibility in development only, do not use it in production)
• TLS support
• io_uring support

🎬 Getting started

gnet is available as a Go module and we highly recommend that you use gnet via Go Modules, with Go 1.11 Modules enabled (Go 1.11+), you can just simply add import "github.com/panjf2000/gnet/v2" to the codebase and run go mod download/go mod tidy or go [build|run|test] to download the necessary dependencies automatically.

With v2

go get -u github.com/panjf2000/gnet/v2

With v1

go get -u github.com/panjf2000/gnet

🎡 Use cases

The following companies/organizations use gnet as the underlying network service in production.

If you have gnet integrated into projects, feel free to open a pull request refreshing this list.

📊 Performance

Benchmarks on TechEmpower

# Hardware Environment
* 28 HT Cores Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 5120 CPU @ 2.20GHz
* 32GB RAM
* Ubuntu 18.04.3 4.15.0-88-generic #88-Ubuntu
* Dedicated Cisco 10-gigabit Ethernet switch
* Go1.19.x linux/amd64

This is a leaderboard of the top 50 out of 499 frameworks that encompass various programming languages worldwide, in which gnet is ranked first.

This is the full framework ranking of Go and gnet tops all the other frameworks, which makes gnet the fastest networking framework in Go.

To see the full ranking list, visit TechEmpower Plaintext Benchmark.

Contrasts to the similar networking libraries

On Linux (epoll)

Test Environment

# Machine information
        OS : Ubuntu 20.04/x86_64
       CPU : 8 CPU cores, AMD EPYC 7K62 48-Core Processor
    Memory : 16.0 GiB

# Go version and settings
Go Version : go1.17.2 linux/amd64
GOMAXPROCS : 8

# Benchmark parameters
TCP connections : 1000/2000/5000/10000
Packet size     : 512/1024/2048/4096/8192/16384/32768/65536 bytes
Test duration   : 15s

Echo benchmark

On MacOS (kqueue)

Test Environment

# Machine information
        OS : MacOS Big Sur/x86_64
       CPU : 6 CPU cores, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz
    Memory : 16.0 GiB

# Go version and settings
Go Version : go1.16.5 darwin/amd64
GOMAXPROCS : 12

# Benchmark parameters
TCP connections : 300/400/500/600/700
Packet size     : 512/1024/2048/4096/8192 bytes
Test duration   : 15s

Echo benchmark

⚠️ License

The source code of gnet should be distributed under the Apache-2.0 license.

👏 Contributors

Please read the Contributing Guidelines before opening a PR and thank you to all the developers who already made contributions to gnet!

⚓ Relevant Articles

• A Million WebSockets and Go
• Going Infinite, handling 1M websockets connections in Go
• Go netpoller 原生网络模型之源码全面揭秘
• gnet: 一个轻量级且高性能的 Golang 网络库
• 最快的 Go 网络框架 gnet 来啦！

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☕️ Buy me a coffee

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💴 Patrons

🔑 JetBrains OS licenses

gnet had been being developed with GoLand IDE under the free JetBrains Open Source license(s) granted by JetBrains s.r.o., hence I would like to express my thanks here.

🔋 Sponsorship

This project is supported by: