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Bandwidth consumption

qbee is designed to run on devices with limited resources. One of these resources is bandwidth. In certain settings (data over mobile network or even satellite link) low bandwidth is a key requirement. On the other hand qbee also wants to be a tool that provides extensive information and convenience. These two requirements sometimes contradict each other and therefore a very granular settings option allows to tweak the bandwidth consumption according to use case.

Bandwidth consumption can be tweaked through settings

In the settings menu a very granular setting option is available to define different setting options for different groups or devices.

VPN connection

Enabling a VPN connection (without making connections) creates a bandwidth load of less than 2,5 KiB per 24 hours.

Test conditions:

This test compares the bandwidth between two identical Raspberry Pi devices. One device is equipped with the qbee agent and bootstrapped to the qbee platform. The other identical device was provisioned at the same time with the same Raspbian image and sits in the same network. The devices run no additional load than what comes with the Raspbian Lite image except for the vnStat network traffic monitor. The qbee VPN is enabled, but no connection is active.

  • OS version: "Raspbian Buster lite"

  • Release date: "27.5.2020"

  • Kernel: "4.19"

  • Hardware: "Raspberry Pi 2"

Test procedure:

  • two identical SD cards are flashed
  • one device gets the qbee agent installed
  • both devices get vnStat installed
  • both devices are in the same network
  • both devices get simultaneously switched on
  • qbee is run with different settings at different times
  • 24 hours are logged on a per hour basis and hours in which no changes have been made are compared

Test results:

Data consumption qbee agent and VPN active, no package or process inventory.

Test scenario Bandwidth per hour (total of rx and tx) in KiB
5 min + metrics 280 KiB/h
5 min, no metrics 201 KiB/h
60 min + metrics 135 KiB/h
60 min, no metrics 127 KiB/h

Detailed comparison to follow.