Python is slow and does not scale

Python is slow and does not scale, right?

Requirements

To get things running, you need

• docker
• the make command, e.g. by installing apt install make

Running the benchmark

First, build the container with the service by running make build.

To run the benchmark, run make bench, which launches the benchmark.sh script.

Note that benchmark.sh launches multiple ab (Apache Benchmark) processes. This happens because ab does not scale over multiple cores and would otherwise become a bottleneck itself. You need to manually add up the results. On powerful machines (~8 CPU cores) you need to launch a third ab process. Edit benchmark.sh to do this (or to change any of the other benchmark parameters).

Since ab is runs on the same machine as the web server itself, part of the system's resources are spent on on ab. However, this facilitates

Benchmark Results

AWS instance type	concurrent connections	vCPUs	physical cores	requests / seconds
c5.large	1250	2	1	4000
c5.xlarge	2500	4	2	8300
c5.2xlarge	5000	8	4	18000
c5.4xlarge	10000	16	8	34500

Note that on c5.4xlarge, I had to start three ab processes.

Links

gevent, a coroutine-based concurrency library for Python