Greg Ingelmo GregIngelmo

Benchmarking Nginx with Go

There are a lot of ways to serve a Go HTTP application. The best choices depend on each use case. Currently nginx looks to be the standard web server for every new project even though there are other great web servers as well. However, how much is the overhead of serving a Go application behind an nginx server? Do we need some nginx features (vhosts, load balancing, cache, etc) or can you serve directly from Go? If you need nginx, what is the fastest connection mechanism? This are the kind of questions I'm intended to answer here. The purpose of this benchmark is not to tell that Go is faster or slower than nginx. That would be stupid.

So, these are the different settings we are going to compare:

Go HTTP standalone (as the control group)
Nginx proxy to Go HTTP
Nginx fastcgi to Go TCP FastCGI
Nginx fastcgi to Go Unix Socket FastCGI

Latency numbers every programmer should know

L1 cache reference ......................... 0.5 ns
Branch mispredict ............................ 5 ns                     on recent CPU
L2 cache reference ........................... 7 ns                     14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock ........................... 25 ns
Main memory reference ...................... 100 ns                     20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy ............. 3,000 ns  =   3 µs
Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network ....... 20,000 ns  =  20 µs
SSD random read ........................ 150,000 ns  = 150 µs

Read 1 MB sequentially from memory ..... 250,000 ns = 250 µs 4X memory

	Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
	----------------------------------
	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
	Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD

	//
	// Created by tdimson on 9/5/12.

	#import <QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h>
	#import "SFSChickenScreen.h"


	@implementation SFSChickenScreen {
	__weak CAEmitterLayer *_chickenEmitter;
	CGFloat _decayAmount;

	package main

	import (
	"fmt"
	"runtime"
	"time"
	)

	func waitAround(die chan bool) {
	<- die

	Team behind Go:
	- Ken Thompson
	- Co-Creator of Unix
	- Co-Creator of UTF-8
	- Creator of 'B', the direct predecessor to the 'C' programming language

	- Rob Pike
	- Co-Creator of Unix
	- Co-Creator of UTF-8
	- Co-Authored Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment with Brian Kernighan

	Team behind Go:
	- Ken Thompson
	- Co-Creator of Unix
	- Co-Creator of UTF-8
	- Creator of 'B', the direct predecessor to the 'C' programming language

	- Rob Pike
	- Member of Unix Team at Bell Labs
	- Creator of Plan 9
	- Co-Creator of UTF-8

	//
	// ViewController.m
	// AVPlayerCaching
	//
	// Created by Anurag Mishra on 5/19/14.
	// Sample code to demonstrate how to cache a remote audio file while streaming it with AVPlayer
	//

	#import "ViewController.h"
	#import <AVFoundation/AVFoundation.h>

	import Foundation

	extension String
	{
	var length: Int {
	get {
	return countElements(self)
	}
	}