Performance

Khora’s HTTP server answers about 174,000 requests a second on a 16-core desktop, in 8.4 MB of memory. That is a little under Go’s standard library on rate and between three and eighty times less memory than any of the runtimes it is measured against. This page says what that measures, what it does not, how to run it yourself, and why every figure published here before September 2026 was between two and twelve times too high.

A benchmark number without the ladder that produced it is unfalsifiable, and an unfalsifiable number in a language’s marketing makes every other claim in the documentation worth less. So the conditions a figure has to meet are written down below, the script checks them on every run, and a server that fails one is reported with the failure instead of with a number.

What is measured

bench/ holds servers that answer the same request, so that the difference between any two of them is one thing:

	what it is
control.rs	Rust, a thread per connection, closing after each request
control_keepalive.rs	the same, holding the connection open
floor/	Khora: accept, read, write a fixed string. No parsing
render/	the floor plus Response::rendered_keeping. No parsing
service/	a Router with one route — the whole of std::net::http
allocator/	not a server: what allocation costs as the heap fills
iteration/	not a server: what for costs against the loop written out

The comparisons that mean something are the differences. floor against control_keepalive is what the runtime costs. service against floor is what the library costs. render sits between them and says how much of the library is building the response rather than reading the request.

A single number for service on its own says nothing, which is why the list is shaped this way.

The numbers

16-core Windows desktop, release builds, 32 connections, generator on the same machine, six-second runs, mean of five, 2 September 2026. These numbers travel with that sentence or they do not travel.

	req/s	p50	p99	peak RSS
C#, ASP.NET Core (Kestrel)	266,267	103us	253us	240 MB
Khora floor	> 234,322	128us	274us	7.4 MB
Khora render	> 234,039	127us	253us	7.8 MB
Rust control, thread per connection	202,182	150us	319us	5.5 MB
Go, net/http	185,670	102us	1,538us	21.8 MB
Khora, std::net::http	174,201	161us	554us	8.4 MB
Java, JDK HttpServer	> 114,200	251us	663us	699 MB
Node, node:http	39,184	682us	4,101us	86.8 MB

floor and render are lower bounds: they are fast enough that the generator was still gaining when given more of the machine. Java’s is one too, because its rate was still climbing at the top of the ladder, which is a JIT that had not finished with the handler.

Khora’s HTTP server is mid-table on throughput and first on memory, and both halves of that are the headline. It is about six per cent under Go’s standard library and a third under Kestrel on requests a second. It does it in 8.4 MB, against Go’s 21.8, Node’s 86.8, Kestrel’s 240 and the JDK’s 699 – between three and eighty times less than the runtimes it is answering as fast as. That is what “no VM and no tracing GC” is worth, in the one column where the claim can be checked.

Each peer is that language’s ordinary server, not a tuned one. Node’s is single-threaded by design and would be several times faster behind cluster; the JDK’s is not what a Java service ships on; fasthttp is faster than net/http. Read the table as what you get writing the obvious thing.

Latency is not throughput. Go answers the median request faster than Khora and the slowest one nearly three times more slowly. A server chosen on peak rate alone would have missed both halves of that.

The comparisons worth the most

The cross-language row is the one people look at and the one that says least, because eight runtimes differ in eight ways at once. The Khora rows differ in one thing at a time and are what the servers were built for:

service against floor is the library: the whole of std::net::http – parse, header map, route match, render – costs about a quarter of the throughput of a socket loop that does none of it. render sits with floor, which puts what is left in reading the request rather than writing the answer. floor against the Rust control is the runtime, and the control is a thread per connection, which is not the fastest way to write it in Rust, so read that pair as “the runtime is not what limits either” rather than as a win.

What was published before this, and why it was wrong

Every throughput figure this project recorded before 2 September 2026 came from a load generator that reported one connection’s rate multiplied by the number of connections, and was between two and twelve times too high.

The old rig ran one process per connection, each timing itself, and divided the total by the duration it was asked for rather than the one it took. Forty-eight Python processes on Windows take fifty-two seconds to get through a four-second run, so the workers barely overlapped, each measured a nearly idle server, and the divisor stayed at four. A rig whose output is proportional to its own worker count cannot flatten, which is exactly why no ceiling was ever found and why the spread between sittings looked like 1.85x – process startup time was what varied.

A server that counts what it answers settled it in twenty lines. The full account is in the errata.

The replacement is bench/loadgen.rs: a few threads each driving many non-blocking connections, rather than a thread or a process per connection. The change that mattered was not the language. A blocking read parks the thread and the kernel wakes it again on every response, about 120 microseconds on a round trip whose median is 29; the same connection spinning on a non-blocking socket answers five times as many requests.

What a figure has to satisfy before it is published

1. A load generator that is not the bottleneck — a separate machine, or a generator that can saturate the server on this one.
2. A ladder of concurrencies where the rate flattens, so that the top of the ladder is the server’s answer and not the client’s.
3. The same configuration repeating across sittings, to within something much tighter than 1.85×.
4. The machine, the profile and the date printed beside the number.

All four hold for the table above, and bench/measure.py checks them on every run rather than leaving them to be remembered. A server that fails one is reported with what failed instead of with a number, which is the whole difference between this rig and the one it replaced: the old one could not fail, so it always produced a figure.

Running them yourself

rustc -O -o bench/loadgen.exe bench/loadgen.rs
rustc -O -o bench/control_keepalive.exe bench/control_keepalive.rs
cargo run -p khora-cli --features llvm -- build bench/service
KHORA_PROFILE=release python bench/measure.py

measure.py starts each server in turn, walks the ladder, repeats the chosen rung and prints the table with the machine and the date on it. One server on its own:

./bench/service/build/service.exe &
./bench/loadgen.exe --port 18952 --label service --connections 32 --seconds 6

Ports are fixed so two cannot be measured at once by accident: floor is 18950, render 18951, service 18952. --watch-pid samples the server’s resident memory while the run is under way.

Build with KHORA_PROFILE=release for anything you intend to quote. A debug build is the default everywhere in this toolchain, deliberately — a language being brought up should give a readable crash before it gives a fast one — and a debug number is not a number about the language. measure.py says so and carries on rather than refusing, because a debug comparison between two Khora servers is still a comparison.

bench/README.md in the repository has the rest, including what each server does and does not do.

What these do not measure

A /health route returning a fixed JSON object is the thinnest possible request. It isolates the library from the handler, which is the point, and it resembles no real workload: nothing here has a body worth parsing, a database behind it, or a response worth rendering. Cold start is not measured, and neither is behaviour under more connections than the machine has cores.