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Comparing the Performance of Various Web Frameworks

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TechEmpower has been running benchmarks for the last year, attempting to measure and compare the performance of web frameworks. For these benchmarks the term “framework” is used loosely including platforms and micro-frameworks.

The results of the first benchmark were published in March 2013, and the tests were conducted on two hardware configurations: 2 Amazon EC2 m1.large instances and 2 Intel Sandy Bridge Core i7-2600K with 8GB of RAM, both setups using Gbit Ethernet. The frameworks had to reply with a simple JSON response {"message" : "Hello, World!"}. Following is an excerpt of the results, showing 10 of the most common web frameworks out of 24 benchmarked along with their results measured in Requests per second (RPS) and percentage of the best result.

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Over the year, the benchmark evolved to cover 119 frameworks, including multiple types of queries and responses and running on one additional hardware configuration: 2 x Dell R720xd Dual-Xeon E5 v2 with 32GB of RAM each and 10 Gbit Ethernet.

Following are excerpts from the recently published 9th round of benchmarking, this time performed on three different hardware configurations:

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Several observations:

While high-end hardware certainly performs better than lower end in terms of RPS, there is a major change in hierarchy for the top frameworks, as it is the case for Xeon E5 vs. Intel I7. This can be correlated with the fact that there are many at over 90% for Intel I7, TechEmpower attributing it to a bottleneck generated by the Ethernet 1Gbit used in the respective configuration:

Since the first round, we have known that the highest-performance frameworks and platforms have been network-limited by our gigabit Ethernet…. With ample network bandwidth, the highest-performing frameworks are further differentiated.

Google’s Go is the first on Intel I7, but has a major drop in performance on Xeon E5 in spite of using all cores, emphasizing the importance of performance tuning for certain types of hardware architectures, as noticed by TechEmpower:

The Peak [Xeon E5] test environment uses servers with 40 HT cores across two Xeon E5 processors, and the results illustrate how well each framework scales to high parallelism on a single server node.

Of course, other variables are at play, such as significantly more HT processor cores--40 versus 8 for our i7 tests--and a different system architecture, NUMA.

Amazon EC2 M1.large is severely underperforming compared with other configurations, making one wonder if the price/performance ratio is still attractive for cloud computing instances.

-*) Most frameworks are based on Linux. No Windows framework was benchmarked on EC2 or I7. The best Windows framework (plain-windows) performed at 18.6% of the leader on E5. Also, Facebook’s HHVM does not appear on EC2. It is also likely that HHVM is tuned differently when it runs on Facebook’s hardware.

Some of the well known frameworks are severely underperforming on all hardware configurations used, such as Grails, Spring, Django and Rails.

The performance of the recently released Dart 1.3 has doubled and should be on par with Node.js’ but it does not show in the benchmark because this round used Dart 1.2. This may be applicable to other frameworks that have been improved lately and the improvements will show up in future benchmarks.

As it is with other performance benchmarks, the results are debatable since they depend on the hardware, network and system configurations. TechEmpower invites those interested in bumping up the results for their favorite framework to fork the code on GitHub.

The benchmark includes detailed explanations on how tests are conducted, the hardware configurations, and the components of each framework: the language, web server, OS, etc.

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