Comparison of different protocols

[MEM-917]

Hello everyone
I was just curious about the different protocols and their respective performance in terms of latency and speed. So, I ran Xray(Reality, Websocket), Hysteria2, V2ray(HTTPupgrade) and OpenVPN 5 times each and the following results are the best case scenario for each one of them. Although this experiment and the outcome is anecdotal, the results are the true representative of what I experienced over the past year using them, especially Xray and Hysteria.

Set-up and Methodology:

• The Internet connection is LTE and the carrier is MCI(the biggest and most obnoxious ISP in Iran)
• The cellphone is used as hotpot so the tests could run on laptop.
• In all these tests, the cellphone was stationary and there was no interruption.
• The main server is based in the US and runs haproxy and nginx as load balancer webserver and connection proxifier.
• The relay server is based in Tehran, Iran and just like the main server, haproxy decides re-routing the connections. There are 4 different backends, 3 of which are distinct servers in the US and EU and the default is webserver for boosting the chance of not getting identified by DPI.
• The relay server is currently not populated by any user as I am configuring it for future use, so the resources during tests are fixed.

Protocols configuration:

• REALITY: The SNI is the same as the webserver and haproxy redirects the incoming connections to listening inbound.
• Websocket: The inbound listens to the nginx as it redirects the connections to the specified path.
• HTTPupgrade: Same as Websocket but the core is V2Ray and the path is different.
• Hysteria2: obfs and masquerade are set. In the optimized test, the values of quic parameters are calculated and “ignoreClientBandwidth” is equal to “false”.
• In all of them, the fingerprint is chrome and for Websocket and HTTPupgrade alpn is set to http/1.1.
• The version of Xray for all systems is 1.8.6 and V2Ray is 5.12.1 and Hysteria is 2.2.2.
• OpenVPN is in udp mode and the version is 2.5.9.

nonProxied:

REALITY - Direct:

REALITY - Relay:

Websocket - Direct:

Websocket - Cloudflare CDN:

Websocket - Cloudflare Worker:

Websocket - Relay:

HTTPupgrade - Direct:

HTTPupgrade - Cloudflare CDN:

HTTPupgrade - Relay:

Hysteria - Direct:

Hysteria - Direct(Optimized):

Hysteria - Relay:

OpenVPN - Relay:

Some observations:

1. OpenVPN can't connect directly.
2. HTTPupgrade doesn't work with Cloudflare workers.
3. In almost all cases with different devices and different ISPs, Reality increases the speed. The recorded speed improvement was almost 1.5 times the non-proxied connection.
4. In daily use, Reality comes very close to Hysteria but the lack of loading time and the feeling of sharpness that comes from Hysteria is substantial.
5. TUIC and Juicity performance were abysmal and the memory usage for the latter was abnormal(Most likely I couldn't configurate it correctly), so I didn't run them in this instance.