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Modernization measurements

Local macOS arm64 results, 2026-09-10. Base commit: 8fe386b; comparison: feature/self-contained-portable-c. Raw JSON lives in measurements. These are short loopback measurements on one machine, not capacity guarantees.

Size and runtime dependencies

Unstripped Release executable sizes in bytes:

Program Old system-shared Old static dependencies Bundled Minimal
ss-local 295,912 1,326,328 756,920 416,424
ss-server 314,360 1,500,968 962,632 622,024
ss-tunnel 268,680 828,712 416,440 397,704

Bundled programs link only macOS OS libraries (libSystem, and where needed libresolv). They need no separately installed libev, c-ares, PCRE2, libsodium or Mbed TLS. Compared with the old static-dependency build, ss-server shrinks about 36%; minimal shrinks about 59%. Compared with a shared-dependency binary alone, bundling makes the executable larger; that comparison excludes the old libraries' disk footprint. Bundled source archives add roughly 12 MB to checkout and release size. There is no configure-time network access or submodule fetch.

TCP and resident memory

Median of three 100 MiB transfers using tests/stress_test.py, old shared dependencies versus bundled. Both sets pass all nine transfers.

Cipher Before Mbps Bundled Mbps Before server RSS after, KiB Bundled server RSS after, KiB
AES-128-GCM 7,002 7,003 3,488 3,040
AES-256-GCM 7,776 8,498 3,488 2,992
ChaCha20-IETF-Poly1305 3,439 3,268 3,472 3,072

Bundled tunnel RSS after transfer was about 2,000–2,032 KiB versus 2,576–2,592 KiB before. RSS includes OS accounting and shared-page effects; this is not a proof of bounded memory under arbitrary workloads. Transfer times are short (roughly 0.1–0.3 s), so the apparent AES-256 improvement and ChaCha regression need longer controlled measurements before drawing performance claims.

UDP

Median of three runs, 2,000 sequential 1,200-byte echo packets per run through SOCKS5 UDP ASSOCIATE. Every packet's payload and relay source port are checked.

Cipher Before payload Mbps Bundled payload Mbps
AES-128-GCM 77.43 75.01
AES-256-GCM 81.34 63.33
ChaCha20-IETF-Poly1305 78.65 67.89

This round-trip benchmark includes Python thread creation, scheduling and SOCKS overhead. It shows lower observed UDP rates in this run, up to 22%; modernization is not claimed to improve UDP throughput. The portable libsodium backend is a maintenance/performance tradeoff. Optimized backends require separate compiler probes and cross-platform known-answer tests before adoption.

Independently of these timings, the new interoperability test exposed the old MTU-sized receive buffer truncating 4 KiB UDP payloads. Full datagram reception now passes 1, 128, 1,200 and 4,096-byte interoperability cases against shadowsocks-rust in both directions.

Reproduce

python3 tests/stress_test.py --bin build-bundled/bin --size 100 --repeat 3 --json tcp.json
python3 tests/measure_udp.py --bin build-bundled/bin --output udp.json
python3 tests/interop.py --bin build-bundled/bin
python3 tests/interop.py --self --bin build-bundled/bin --plugin tests/sip003_fixture.py

Run comparisons serially. The baseline was rebuilt from its own worktree using the preserved original dependency checkouts; no modernization fixes were applied to that source. The historical curl interop harness obeyed no_proxy and could bypass SOCKS, so its old results are excluded from compatibility evidence.