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
The hardware is a very cheap one. Since we will compare all settings in the same hardware, this should not be a big deal.
- Samsung Laptop NP550P5C-AD1BR
- Intel Core i7 3630QM @2.4GHz (quad core, 8 threads)
- CPU caches: (L1: 256KiB, L2: 1MiB, L3: 6MiB)
- RAM 8GiB DDR3 1600MHz
- Ubuntu 13.10 amd64 Saucy Salamander (updated)
- Nginx 1.4.4 (1.4.4-1~saucy0 amd64)
- Go 1.2 (linux/amd64)
- wrk 3.0.4
Just a little bit tuning in the kernel to allow higher limits. If you have some better idea with this variables, please drop a comment bellow:
fs.file-max 9999999
fs.nr_open 9999999
net.core.netdev_max_backlog 4096
net.core.rmem_max 16777216
net.core.somaxconn 65535
net.core.wmem_max 16777216
net.ipv4.ip_forward 0
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range 1025 65535
net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout 30
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time 30
net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog 20480
net.ipv4.tcp_max_tw_buckets 400000
net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save 1
net.ipv4.tcp_syn_retries 2
net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries 2
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle 1
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse 1
vm.min_free_kbytes 65536
vm.overcommit_memory 1
The max open files limit for root and www-data was configured to be 200,000.
Some nginx tuning is needed. As some folks told me, I disabled gzip to be more fair in the comparisons. Here is its config file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:
user www-data;
worker_processes auto;
worker_rlimit_nofile 200000;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 10000;
use epoll;
multi_accept on;
}
http {
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;
keepalive_timeout 300;
keepalive_requests 10000;
types_hash_max_size 2048;
open_file_cache max=200000 inactive=300s;
open_file_cache_valid 300s;
open_file_cache_min_uses 2;
open_file_cache_errors on;
server_tokens off;
dav_methods off;
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log combined;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
gzip off;
gzip_vary off;
include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.conf;
}upstream go_http {
server 127.0.0.1:8080;
keepalive 300;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name go.http;
access_log off;
error_log /dev/null crit;
location / {
proxy_pass http://go_http;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Connection "";
}
}
upstream go_fcgi_tcp {
server 127.0.0.1:9001;
keepalive 300;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name go.fcgi.tcp;
access_log off;
error_log /dev/null crit;
location / {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_keep_conn on;
fastcgi_pass go_fcgi_tcp;
}
}
upstream go_fcgi_unix {
server unix:/tmp/go.sock;
keepalive 300;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name go.fcgi.unix;
access_log off;
error_log /dev/null crit;
location / {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_keep_conn on;
fastcgi_pass go_fcgi_unix;
}
}package main
import (
"fmt"
"log"
"net"
"net/http"
"net/http/fcgi"
"os"
"os/signal"
"syscall"
)
var (
abort bool
)
const (
SOCK = "/tmp/go.sock"
)
type Server struct {
}
func (s Server) ServeHTTP(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
body := "Hello World\n"
// Try to keep the same amount of headers
w.Header().Set("Server", "gophr")
w.Header().Set("Connection", "keep-alive")
w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "text/plain")
w.Header().Set("Content-Length", fmt.Sprint(len(body)))
fmt.Fprint(w, body)
}
func main() {
sigchan := make(chan os.Signal, 1)
signal.Notify(sigchan, os.Interrupt)
signal.Notify(sigchan, syscall.SIGTERM)
server := Server{}
go func() {
http.Handle("/", server)
if err := http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil); err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
}()
go func() {
tcp, err := net.Listen("tcp", ":9001")
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
fcgi.Serve(tcp, server)
}()
go func() {
unix, err := net.Listen("unix", SOCK)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
fcgi.Serve(unix, server)
}()
<-sigchan
if err := os.Remove(SOCK); err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
}To be fair all requests must have the same size.
$ curl -sI http://127.0.0.1:8080/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 12
Content-Type: text/plain
Server: gophr
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2013 14:59:14 GMT
$ curl -sI http://127.0.0.1:8080/ | wc -c
141$ curl -sI http://go.http/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2013 14:59:31 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 12
Connection: keep-alive
$ curl -sI http://go.http/ | wc -c
141$ curl -sI http://go.fcgi.tcp/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 12
Connection: keep-alive
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2013 14:59:40 GMT
Server: gophr
$ curl -sI http://go.fcgi.tcp/ | wc -c
141$ curl -sI http://go.fcgi.unix/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 12
Connection: keep-alive
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2013 15:00:15 GMT
Server: gophr
$ curl -sI http://go.fcgi.unix/ | wc -c
141- Configure kernel with sysctl
- Configure nginx
- Configure nginx vhosts
- Load the server as www-data
- Run the benchmarks
# wrk -t100 -c5000 -d30s http://127.0.0.1:8080/
Running 30s test @ http://127.0.0.1:8080/
100 threads and 5000 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 116.96ms 17.76ms 173.96ms 85.31%
Req/Sec 429.16 49.20 589.00 69.44%
1281567 requests in 29.98s, 215.11MB read
Requests/sec: 42745.15
Transfer/sec: 7.17MB# wrk -t100 -c5000 -d30s http://go.http/
Running 30s test @ http://go.http/
100 threads and 5000 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 124.57ms 18.26ms 209.70ms 80.17%
Req/Sec 406.29 56.94 0.87k 89.41%
1198450 requests in 29.97s, 201.16MB read
Requests/sec: 39991.57
Transfer/sec: 6.71MB# wrk -t100 -c5000 -d30s http://go.fcgi.tcp/
Running 30s test @ http://go.fcgi.tcp/
100 threads and 5000 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 514.57ms 119.80ms 1.21s 71.85%
Req/Sec 97.18 22.56 263.00 79.59%
287416 requests in 30.00s, 48.24MB read
Socket errors: connect 0, read 0, write 0, timeout 661
Requests/sec: 9580.75
Transfer/sec: 1.61MB# wrk -t100 -c5000 -d30s http://go.fcgi.unix/
Running 30s test @ http://go.fcgi.unix/
100 threads and 5000 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 425.64ms 80.53ms 925.03ms 76.88%
Req/Sec 117.03 22.13 255.00 81.30%
350162 requests in 30.00s, 58.77MB read
Socket errors: connect 0, read 0, write 0, timeout 210
Requests/sec: 11670.72
Transfer/sec: 1.96MB# wrk -t100 -c5000 -d30s http://127.0.0.1:8080/
Running 30s test @ http://127.0.0.1:8080/
100 threads and 5000 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 39.25ms 8.49ms 86.45ms 81.39%
Req/Sec 1.29k 129.27 1.79k 69.23%
3837995 requests in 29.89s, 644.19MB read
Requests/sec: 128402.88
Transfer/sec: 21.55MB# wrk -t100 -c5000 -d30s http://go.http/
Running 30s test @ http://go.http/
100 threads and 5000 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 336.77ms 297.88ms 632.52ms 60.16%
Req/Sec 2.36k 2.99k 19.11k 84.83%
2232068 requests in 29.98s, 374.64MB read
Requests/sec: 74442.91
Transfer/sec: 12.49MB# wrk -t100 -c5000 -d30s http://go.fcgi.tcp/
Running 30s test @ http://go.fcgi.tcp/
100 threads and 5000 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 217.69ms 121.22ms 1.80s 75.14%
Req/Sec 263.09 102.78 629.00 62.54%
721027 requests in 30.01s, 121.02MB read
Socket errors: connect 0, read 0, write 176, timeout 1343
Requests/sec: 24026.50
Transfer/sec: 4.03MB# wrk -t100 -c5000 -d30s http://go.fcgi.unix/
Running 30s test @ http://go.fcgi.unix/
100 threads and 5000 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 694.32ms 332.27ms 1.79s 62.13%
Req/Sec 646.86 669.65 6.11k 87.80%
909836 requests in 30.00s, 152.71MB read
Requests/sec: 30324.77
Transfer/sec: 5.09MBThe first set of benchmarks was made with ab and some nginx settings was not very well optimized (gzip was enabled and it was not using keep-alive connections with the Go backend). After changing to wrk and following the suggestions to optimize nginx the results gone very different.
With GOMAXPROCS=1, the nginx overhead is not so big after all, but with GOMAXPROCS=8 the difference is huge. I may try another settings in the future but for now, If you need nginx features like virtual hosting, load balancing, caching, etc, use the HTTP proxy connection instead of FastCGI. Some folks said that Go's FastCGI is not well optimized and this may be the cause of the huge differences in the results presented here.
See also: https://gist.github.com/azer/5955772