NodeMCU Upload Speed benchmark

Here’s a short comparison I did of 3 command-line tools for uploading Lua and other files to your esp8266 via USB. In this test I’m only looking at tools to transfer files to a Lua-based nodemcu board. (not flashing the actual firmware like you do with the Arduino IDE)

Tool seconds kb/s
Luatool.py 35.9 0.08
nodemcu-tool 9.2 0.3
nodemcu-uploader 1.3 2.2

(Tested by uploading a 2.8kb file)

Apparently, there’s a huge difference in the speed that these tools achieve when uploading files. The clear winner is nodemcu-uploader, which is 7x faster than nodemcu-tool and a whopping 27x faster than luatool.py

Combining the upload speed of nodemcu-uploader with my build script that only uploads changed files, your dev cycle is a guaranteed to be fast ;-)