# emmericp/MoonGen

MoonGen is a fully scriptable high-speed packet generator built on DPDK and LuaJIT. It can saturate a 10 Gbit/s connection with 64 byte packets on a single CPU core while executing user-provided Lua scripts for each packet. Multi-core support allows for even higher rates. It also features precise and accurate timestamping and rate control.

Repository: https://github.com/emmericp/MoonGen
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/moongen
Language: Lua
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Topics: packet-generator, lua, dpdk
Last push: 2025-11-30T09:22:25+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 57/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 54, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4358, "days_push": 276, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1116, forks 239 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:38.477920+00:00)

## What it is
MoonGen is a scriptable high-speed packet generator built on DPDK and LuaJIT that can saturate 10 Gbit/s Ethernet links with 64-byte packets on a single CPU core. All packets are crafted in real time by user-provided Lua scripts, with hardware-based timestamping and precise rate control.

## Use cases
- generate high-speed network traffic to saturate a 10 Gbit/s link
- benchmark firewalls and middle-boxes with custom traffic patterns
- measure latency with sub-microsecond hardware timestamping
- test packet loss in a system under test
- script custom per-packet traffic generation in Lua
- generate precise traffic patterns for network experiments

## When to choose
- you need line-rate packet generation with per-packet scripting flexibility
- you require precise hardware timestamping and rate control on commodity hardware
- you want to benchmark network devices or middle-boxes with custom test scripts

## When to avoid
- you need a simple GUI-based traffic generator
- your tests run on non-Linux platforms
- you only need low-rate traffic without precise timing

## Facets
- artifact type: cli-tool
- maturity: maintenance
- function: networking, benchmarking, testing
- domain: networking, developer-tools, performance
- platform: cli
- tags: packet-generator, dpdk, luajit, traffic-generation, latency-measurement, linux

## Member repositories
- emmericp/MoonGen (main) score 57

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:38.477920+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T06:41:57.894258+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/emmericp/MoonGen (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:38.477920+00:00, sha 859ef4e0b3b8)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.