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MTE Relay v5.0: faster, leaner, stronger

· 2 min read
Trevor Blackman
Trevor Blackman
Engineering Director

MTE Relay v5 is a new major version with a new wire protocol, and on the same hardware it outperforms v4 across the board: up to 37% more requests per second, about 90% less memory per relay, and up to 39% lower latency.

Measured against v4​

  • 90% less memory per relay with 5 to 10 KB requests: about 150 MB in v5 against about 2 GB in v4.
  • 37% more requests per second on the same 2 CPU relay with 10 KB requests, and 16% more with two relays.
  • 39% lower latency at light load with two relays, and a 29% faster p99 under full load.
  • 1 Redis instead of 2 for high availability: only the inbound side needs shared state.

Measured October 1 to 2, 2026: v5 5.0.0 against the June 2026 v4 certification runs on the same workstation, median of four runs. The v5 executive brief has every chart, and the engineering guide describes the v5 run and lists every v5 figure.

New in v5​

  • Kyber 1024 key exchange, with a compatibility check before pairing.
  • Verified frames. Every frame is validated before decoding and verified before any plaintext is released. The method, status, and headers are protected too.
  • A leaner data path. Compact binary frames replace text encoding, and request metadata takes one cryptographic operation instead of two.
  • An optional control panel for fleet health, live configuration changes, change history, and rollback.
  • One frame, three transports. The same frame format underpins SocketX v2 for WebSocket and the TCP Gateway.

The complete list is in What is new in v5.

Upgrading​

  • v4 clients cannot connect to a v5 relay. Upgrade the relay and its client SDKs together, and pilot one application first.
  • Follow Upgrading from v4 for the step by step plan.
  • MTE Relay v4 is supported until October 1, 2027.