Benchmarking your node

One reinstall, half an hour, and you get a URL: a page that says what this machine actually is — CPU, disk, memory, the IP's standing, speeds to a dozen places, and the nine routes back into China — in Chinese, English, French and German, switched by whoever is reading it.

It is meant to be pasted where you are selling the node, or sent to somebody asking "what am I buying".

Nothing on the page is checked by anybody. It says what the machine measured and what you typed. That is worth knowing in both directions: it is why the page is honest about your machine, and why a page somebody else sends you is worth exactly as much as your trust in them.

1. The address

Everything on this page starts from one image reference:

ghcr.io/yinyue123/hqnode:benchmark

Reinstall a container onto it and the benchmark runs on its own, once, on the first boot after the install. There is nothing to install, nothing to start, and no second command.

Your container needs a /data disk

Everything the run keeps lives there, including the one key that lets you edit the page afterwards, and /data is the only thing a reinstall does not erase. Without it you get one page and can never change it. The container page tells you whether you have one — and the button you are about to press says keep /data on it.

2. Reinstall it, on the container page

Reinstall… on your container's page opens a dialog with three tabs. The one that takes an address is an image of my own:

Paste the address, type the container's own name into the box under it, press Reinstall, keep /data. About a minute later the container is back, on the benchmark image, and the run has already started.

Two things have to be true for that tab to exist at all: the machine's policy has to allow images its tenants bring, and the container has to have a disk of its own. The dialog says which one is missing, and both are your host's to change.

Or from a shell inside the container

reinstall is a command your current system carries, so this is the same operation typed from whatever the container is right now:

reinstall ref ghcr.io/yinyue123/hqnode:benchmark

Your SSH session drops while the container is rebuilt. That is the reinstall happening, not a fault.

Why a reinstall and not "install a program"

The image is the program. It carries every tool the checks need, already built, so a run downloads test payloads and nothing else — no package manager in the middle of a disk benchmark skewing the disk benchmark.

Coming back is the button, not a command

This image does not carry reinstall — it is a benchmark, not a general-purpose box. Once you are on it, going back to Debian or Alpine is the Reinstall button on the container page, on the market tab. Nothing is stuck; you just cannot do it from inside any more.

3. Wait, and watch if you like

Twenty to fifty minutes, and it moves a few GB of speedtest traffic, which comes out of your container's allowance. On a small plan check the allowance first.

The log ends with your URL, and nq-shop show prints it at any time afterwards:

tail -f /data/nodequality/first-boot.log

published as https://shop.hqno.de/r/xxxxxxxxxx

The run happens once. It is keyed on whether a page has been published, so a run that dies halfway is retried at the next boot, and a run that worked is never repeated — restarting the container does not re-benchmark it.

4. Everything else is one screen

SSH into the container and you do not get a shell. You get this:

  Node report

  page     https://shop.hqno.de/r/m9Te5tPag6
  langs    ?lang=zh · en · fr · de
  state    published

  What you can change
   1  Node name   HKT Hong Kong residential node
   2  Tags        AS4760 HKT · PCCW IMS · Native IP · Residential
   3  Plans       1C / 1 GB ¥49 · 2C / 2 GB ¥89 · 4C / 4 GB ¥169
   4  Contacts    @nodedeck · [email protected] · +852 5000 0000
   5  Hours       Daily 10:00-22:00 HKT · 5 minutes after payment
   6  Notes       the wording the page ships with
   7  Language    zh

  What to do
   p  save and publish  (in the background; closing SSH is fine)
   b  run the benchmark again  (20-50 minutes, a few GB)
   s  a shell
   q  quit

That address is a real page — the demo node, every section filled, in English, Chinese, French and German. It is what yours will look like with your numbers in it.

Type a number and it asks you one question at a time, showing what is there now. Type a new value to change it; press Enter to keep what is there. That rule is the whole thing, and it is the same at every prompt.

Three details it handles so you do not have to:

Prices are numbers	Type 49. The yearly saving is worked out from the two numbers and printed in all four languages on its own
Four languages off one answer	It asks for Chinese and English. French and German fall back to English, then to Chinese
@ is a lookup	A Telegram handle typed @yourname is stored escaped, so it keeps its sign instead of being read as a key

Every answer is written to disk the moment you give it. There is no save step to forget, and closing the terminal loses nothing you have already typed.

The file behind it is still /data/nodequality/shop.json, still yours, and still editable by hand over SFTP if you would rather — but nothing on this page asks you to.

5. Publishing, which does not need you to wait

p rebuilds the page and publishes it in the background. The benchmark does not re-run, and the URL does not change: the key in /data is what proves the page is yours to replace, so the second publish lands on the first one rather than making a second page.

Publishing costs a few seconds to a minute of one core — the endpoint charges proof of work instead of asking you for an account. It runs detached from your SSH session, so you can close the terminal. Log back in and the screen says where it got to:

  状态   发布中 · 算工作量 75%（已试 3145728 次）· 12 秒前开始

and when it is done, the URL is at the top of the screen again.

Then turn the container off

Nothing needs to keep running once the page is published — the page lives on the endpoint, not on your machine. Stop the container and it costs you no CPU and no memory. Start it again whenever you want to change a price: /data still holds your answers, your measurements and the key to the page.

The key is the page

/data/nodequality/credentials.json is the only thing that can ever replace your page. Lose it and the page stays up, readable, forever, and you cannot touch it. It survives reinstalls because it is in /data; it does not survive deleting the container. Back it up if the page matters.

6. If you would rather type commands

The wizard is a front end to one program, and every step of it is a command of its own. s from the menu gives you a shell, and so does hqnode exec <name> sh:

nq-shop status	what a publish started earlier is doing
nq-shop bench	the CPU numbers again, about two minutes
nq-shop route	the nine backhaul routes again
nq-shop collect --skip net	everything except the gigabytes
nq-shop build	rebuild the page from what is on disk
nq-shop publish	push it, same URL

hqnode exec gives up after 60 seconds

If you are driving this from the host rather than from a shell inside the container, hqnode exec returns context deadline exceeded after a minute and blames the agent. The command keeps running inside the container; you just lose its output. Start long ones detached, or use the wizard, which starts everything long in the background on purpose.

7. What the page will not tell you

• No score on it can be verified by the reader. The CPU tiles come from sysbench, 7-Zip, OpenSSL and stress-ng, none of which publishes a result anywhere. They compare honestly against another page made this way and against nothing else.
• The multi-thread score is the optimistic one. It uses the cgroup ceiling, which on hqnode is your burst limit rather than the cores you are sold.
• Free text stays in the language it was collected in. An AS name or a city name does not translate; fixed vocabularies — yes/no, blocked/open, risk levels — do.
• The route sections need the routes to be traceable. They are, from a container, but only over UDP; if your host filters that, those two sections come back empty rather than wrong.

Where next

• Using your container — what reinstall does, and why /data is the part that survives it
• Public ports — if you want the page on your own domain instead