Container Runtime Interface (CRI) Performance Benchmarking

June 2, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

CRI performance benchmarking provides a benchmarking framework for CRI-compatible container runtimes. This allows the CRI runtime developers to benchmark the performance of their runtime without needing to set up Kubernetes components or run Kubernetes benchmark tests.

Install

The benchmarking tests binary critest can be downloaded from Releasing page:

VERSION="v1.36.0"
ARCH="amd64"
wget https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cri-tools/releases/download/$VERSION/critest-$VERSION-linux-$ARCH.tar.gz
sudo tar zxvf critest-$VERSION-linux-$ARCH.tar.gz -C /usr/local/bin
rm -f critest-$VERSION-linux-$ARCH.tar.gz

Running tests

Prerequisite

Before running the test, you need to ensure that the CRI server under test is running and listening on a Unix socket or a Windows named pipe. Because the benchmark tests are designed to request changes (e.g., create/delete) to the containers and verify that correct status is reported, it expects to be the only user of the CRI server. Please make sure that 1) there are no existing CRI-managed containers running on the node, and 2) no other processes (e.g., Kubelet) will interfere with the tests.

Defining benchmarking parameters

You can optionally specify some parameters detailing how benchmarks should be run.

# The number of container lifecycle benchmarks to run:
containersNumber: 100

# The number of container lifecycle benchmarks to run in parallel.
# The total number of samples will be floor(containersNumber / containersNumberParallel)
containersNumberParallel: 2

# The number of pod lifecycle benchmarks to run:
podsNumber: 1000
# The number of pod lifecycle benchmarks to run in parallel.
# The total number of samples will be floor(podsNumber/ podsNumberParallel)
podsNumberParallel: 1

Run

critest -benchmark
    [--benchmarking-params-file /path/to/params.yml]
    [--benchmarking-output-dir /path/to/outdir/]

This will

  • Connect to the shim of CRI container runtime
  • Run the benchmark tests using ginkgo
  • Output the test results to STDOUT

critest connects to Unix: unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock or Windows: npipe:////./pipe/containerd-containerd by default. For other runtimes, the endpoint can be set by flags --runtime-endpoint and --image-endpoint.

Additional options

  • -ginkgo.focus: Only run the tests that match the regular expression.
  • -image-endpoint: Set the endpoint of image service. Same with runtime-endpoint if not specified.
  • -runtime-endpoint: Set the endpoint of runtime service. Default to Unix: unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock or Windows: npipe:////./pipe/containerd-containerd.
  • -benchmarking-params-file: optional path to a YAML file containing parameters describing which benchmarks should be run.
  • -benchmarking-output-dir: optional path to a pre-existing directory in which to write JSON files detailing the results of the benchmarks.
  • -ginkgo.skip: Skip the tests that match the regular expression.
  • -h: Show help and all supported options.