190,000 req/seq (micro benchmarks) ... Haskell webserver shootout continues | Hacker News Reader

190,000 req/seq (micro benchmarks) ... Haskell webserver shootout continues

docs.yesodweb.com

54 pointsdons18 comments

I don't get what these benchmarks are supposed to do. I mean, it's great that a server takes 5 μs to complete a request, but when my own code takes 10 ms to run, does it really matter? It's 2,000 times slower, it's not like the webserver is the bottleneck...

Well, the faster the webserver, the more time is left for code to run while still having a very responsive website.

Let's suppose the webserver takes 0ms to run. How much would that help ?

To serve a single client, it doesn't matter, but when you're serving more than a few thousand of clients concurrently, there's benefits to a faster web-server. I mean, more concurrent clients on the same hardware, better average/worst-case latency, need for less hardware, less chance of a bottleneck...

That still doesn't make much sense. The gains of sticking with a proven, solid server which you are familiar with surely outweigh the 0.5% speed increase.

To be honest, I'm not really aching for a 0.5% speedup (at best).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

Misleading title. I expected to find a comparison of various webservers. Instead it looks like release notes from somebody's web framework.

Incidentally, the proposed HTML syntax in the 2nd half of the article is terrible. Developers have been closing HTML tags for 15 years now, to the point where we've associated little pyramids with correctness. All this syntax does is make all your code look broken all the time.

These are comparisons of various Haskell webservers, running the same micro benchmark, and the given number for Warp is provided. There are links to older benchmarks against servers in other languages.

Look for the big graph with different columns for different webservers.

How do other non-Haskell Web-Servers perform? Is there somewhere a pong benchmark, say for Tomcat, PHP?

Yes there is, this is a comparison to Snap, while a comparison of Snap to other frameworks including node.js is here: http://snapframework.com/blog/2010/11/17/snap-0.3-benchmarks

Many thanks for the link! I did not expect PHP and Ruby to be so slow...

I am happy to see that Haskell gets better support for Web programming.

These benchmarks are misleading.

Looking at the github repo, they're comparing a rails app (full MVC, router, etc) against a node app (regex-based routing) to a snap application, which unless I'm missing something about snap actually seems to be two different applications, one to serve files and one that responds "pong".

Instead of a rails app they should have benchmarked a rack app.

What benchmark is this?

It looks like they are comparing the new speeds to the first benchmark on this page:

http://docs.yesodweb.com/blog/announcing-warp

The article mentions the "pong" benchmark which seems to reside here: https://github.com/snoyberg/benchmarks. Looking at the code is doesn't do anything besides answering "pong" to any request so it's mostly about testing the overhead of the webserver, not its resilience against high loads.

I may be wrong, but with those benchmarks, the "typical" servers are configured to load the text "PONG" from a file as opposed to the haskell servers that are hard-coded to do it. Surely I/O gives them a massive disadvantage?

Yesod does support sendfile: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/yesod/0.7.1/doc/...

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