Benchmarks · October 2026
Pull the plug and keep the recording.
We cut the power on a recording robot ten times. The Insaion Agent never lost more than 2 seconds. ros2 bag record lost about half a minute every time.
Seconds of recording lost in a typical power cut. Lower is better.
37x less data lost
Each dot is one power cut at a random moment. The line marks the median.
Made for bad networks
Robots live on cellular and patchy Wi-Fi. We tested for it.
offline, and live telemetry still arrives
It waits on the robot's disk and reaches the cloud within seconds of the link coming back.
is enough for live telemetry
Slower than old 2G data, with 5% packet loss. Over 99.9% arrived.
recording uploaded over a patchy 2 Mbit/s link
Through two outages and a crash, with only 2% sent twice.
for an urgent clip to jump the queue
Urgent uploads go first. A 1.7 GB upload already running steps aside, then picks up where it left off.
Uploads that follow the link
A 755 MB upload while the signal drops to 256 kbit/s, cuts out and comes back. It slows down, waits and speeds up again on its own, and 100% of live telemetry still arrives.
The same data, nothing dropped
Both recorders stored what the robot published, within 1%.
What it costs
On a typical AMR. ros2 bag record only records. The Insaion Agent also streams live telemetry and runs its own storage, so it uses a bit more CPU.
CPU, % of one core
Memory
How we tested
- The robot
- A typical AMR: IMU, odometry, TF, a camera, a lidar and 20 metrics. We also replayed real robot and drone recordings.
- The rival
- Stock ros2 bag record writing MCAP with the same compression and file split as the Insaion Agent.
- Power cuts
- An Ubuntu 24.04 machine on ext4, hard reset with nothing flushed, 30 to 90 s into the recording. Ten cuts each, read back after reboot.
- Networks
- Day-long outages, slow and lossy links and modem-sized buffers, shaped with Linux traffic control, against a local cloud that counts what arrives.
- Hardware
- A Ryzen 7 7800X3D PC, and a Raspberry Pi 4 with an SD card at half the sensor rate.
- Version
- Insaion Agent 1.0.0 on ROS 2 Jazzy.
Questions
Why does ros2 bag record lose so much in a power cut?
It writes through the operating system's cache and leaves flushing to the kernel, so the last half minute or so is still in memory when power goes. The Insaion Agent seals its recording about once a second and stores it durably, so a power cut costs about a second.
Does the Insaion Agent use more CPU than ros2 bag record?
A little. ros2 bag record only records. The Insaion Agent also streams live telemetry, runs its own storage engine and handles uploads. On a typical robot that is about 2.5% of one core more on a PC, and about 13% more on a Raspberry Pi 4.
Do I need to change my ROS 2 code to get these results?
No. The Insaion Agent discovers your ROS 2 topics by itself. There is no SDK and no code to change.
See it on your own robot
One install. The agent finds your ROS 2 topics by itself, with no SDK and no code changes.