HTTP GET performance comparison

Client was run on Azure DS1_V2 (1 core) for parity since Python and JS are limited to a single CPU. Server was run on Azure DS3_V2 (4 cores) to ensure server was not the bottleneck.

Client	Description	Connections	Requests Per Second
wrk	Benchmarking tool (written in C)	256	71,284
bombardier	Benchmarking tool (written in go)	256	62,988
net-sockets	.NET Core Async Sockets	64	67,231
net-http-client	.NET Core Async HttpClient	64	28,099
java-reactor-netty	Java Reactor Netty	64	26,546
js-sockets	JavaScript net.Socket	128	64,795
js-http	JavaScript http	64	13,971
js-node-fetch	JavaScript node-fetch	64	8,430
python-sockets	Python Async Sockets	256	33,652
python-aiohttp	Python Async AioHttp	32	2,135

wrk is a benchmarking tool written in C and designed for maximum throughput. It represents the theoretical maximum performance of any language's HTTP client implementation.

bombardier is an alternative benchmarking tool written in Go.

net-sockets, js-sockets, and python-raw-sockets use raw sockets to send an HTTP GET message and read the response bytes. The request message bytes are pre-computed and reused for every request, and the response bytes are read but not parsed. This represents the theoretical maximum performance of a given language's HTTP client implementation. (python-sockets uses Python's async socket interface from the stdlib's asyncio library.)

net-http-client uses the System.Net.HttpClient client.

java-reactor-netty uses the reactor-netty client.

js-http uses the http client, and js-node-fetch uses the node-fetch client.

python-aiohttp uses the aiohttp client.

Repro Steps

For the most accurate results, the server and client apps should be run on separate machines.

Server

The server is a tiny ASP.NET Core application which listens on port 5000 and reponds to all requests with the following response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK                                            
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2020 20:15:32 GMT                        
Content-Type: text/plain                                   
Server: Kestrel                                            
Content-Length: 13                                         
                                                
Hello, World!

1. git clone https://github.com/mikeharder/http-get-perf
2. cd http-get-perf/server
3. docker compose run --rm server
4. The same instance of the server can be re-used for all test runs

Client

The client apps make HTTP GET requests to the server in a loop and measure throughput. Example:

~/http-get-perf/python-aiohttp$ docker-compose run --rm client http://server-host-or-ip:5000
=== Parameters ===
Url: http://server-host-or-ip:5000
Parallel: 32
Warmup: 10
Duration: 10

=== Warmup ===
Completed 15,680 requests in 10.03 seconds (1,564 req/s)

=== Test ===
Completed 17,055 requests in 10.03 seconds (1,701 req/s)

1. git clone https://github.com/mikeharder/http-get-perf
2. cd http-get-perf/<client-app>
3. docker compose run --rm client http://<server-host-or-ip>:5000