Benchmarking several backend applications

• Why?
  • I’m mainly concerned with what I have in my development toolbelt - that means Python, JS, Clojure & Rust.
  • It is widely known that Rust is the most performant language, but still I want to see how fast it is compared to other frameworks/libraries I’ve been using daily for enterprise-grade application development.
  • Learning fun - Thats why!

Subjects for testing

• FastAPI (python)
• Actix-Web (rust)
• HTTPKit with Reitis (clojure)
• Light-4J (java)

NOTE

• source code for HTTPKit app is here
• no source code available for Light4j

Scenario

• Tool: bombardier
• Concurrent connection: 100
• Duration: 30s
• Env: production for all test app
• Testing on a simple API that return sum of 2 numbers, in the following format

GET <host:port>/<lang>/plus?x=1&y=3

# response
{
   "total": 4
}

Results

• HTTPKit

$ bombardier -c 100 -d 30s "http://localhost:8080/clojure/plus?x=1&y=3"
Bombarding http://localhost:8080/clojure/plus?x=1&y=3 for 30s using 100 connection(s)
[====================================================================================] 30s
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec     30265.79   11146.13   48148.98
  Latency        3.32ms     3.46ms   319.56ms
  Throughput:     6.72MB/s

• FastAPI

$ bombardier -c 100 -d 30s "http://localhost:5000/python/plus?x=3&y=1"
Bombarding http://localhost:5000/python/plus?x=3&y=1 for 30s using 100 connection(s)
[===================================================================================] 30s
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec     10740.29    1730.15   13932.79
  Latency        9.32ms     8.50ms   379.46ms
  Throughput:     2.22MB/s

NOTE: to be frank, I expected more from FastAPI :(

• Actix-Web

$ bombardier -c 100 -d 30s "http://localhost:8080/rust/plus?x=1&y=3"
Bombarding http://localhost:8080/rust/plus?x=1&y=3 for 30s using 100 connection(s)
[===================================================================================] 30s
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec     81700.23   13506.45   93240.30
  Latency        1.22ms     3.18ms   293.96ms
  Throughput:    15.40MB/s

• Light-4J

$ bombardier -c 100 -d 30s "http://localhost:8080/light4j/plus?x=3&y=2"
Bombarding http://localhost:8080/light4j/plus?x=3&y=2 for 30s using 100 connection(s)
[===================================================================================] 30s
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec     83641.34   11065.35  101699.66
  Latency        1.21ms     5.73ms   308.53ms
  Throughput:    16.11MB/s

Summary

• ActixWeb ~ Light-4J
• ActixWeb ~ 2.5x faster than HTTPKit
• HTTPKit ~ 3x faster than FastAPI

  May add some more server-app later…