📊Benchmarks

This page compares throughput under a controlled workload and documents the versions, environment, and measurement conditions.

🧭 How the comparison was run

• Versions. Pingclair v0.2.0-rc.3, measured from that release candidate’s binary, nginx 1.31.6, and Caddy 2.11.4. Later patch releases are not re-measured.
• Host. One Apple M2 laptop running OrbStack.
• Limits. Every server runs in a container capped at two CPUs, with the same worker count and the same 1 KiB payload.
• Topology. The reverse-proxy backend runs in its own container on the same Docker network.
• Load generator. HTTP/1.1, HTTPS/1.1, and HTTP/2 use a native h2load. HTTP/3 uses an ngtcp2-enabled h2load inside the same Docker network.

📊 Results

Each value is requests per second: the median of three interleaved rounds of 50,000 requests. A row counts only when every request succeeded.

Scenario	Pingclair	nginx 1.31.6	Caddy 2.11.4
HTTP/1.1 static	46,125	39,478	18,266
HTTPS/1.1 static	40,721	31,508	19,978
HTTP/2 static	92,369	41,972	17,424
HTTP/3 static	56,180	55,638	22,912
HTTP/1.1 reverse proxy	20,856	22,584	17,117
HTTPS/1.1 reverse proxy	20,297	21,944	16,660
HTTP/2 reverse proxy	23,181	20,396	not completed
HTTP/3 reverse proxy	28,078	22,213	not completed

Against nginx, Pingclair has higher throughput in the HTTP/1.1, HTTPS/1.1, and HTTP/2 static rows (1.2x, 1.3x, and 2.2x respectively), while HTTP/3 static throughput is approximately equal. On the reverse-proxy workload it is 14% ahead on HTTP/2 and 26% ahead on HTTP/3, while HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS/1.1 remain about 8% behind nginx.

📐 Conditions that limit these numbers

• The host is a laptop. Absolute throughput is not a capacity claim, and the ratios describe relative performance under this controlled workload only.
• Compare within a row. The HTTP/3 load generator runs in a different environment from the others, so absolute throughput should not be compared across protocols, only between servers within a row.
• Incomplete rows are not comparisons. On this host and harness, Caddy did not complete the proxied HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 rows: upstream connection churn exhausted the container’s available ephemeral ports at the tested concurrency. Those cells are reported as incomplete rather than measured under a different workload.
• The results are host-dependent. The relative position of the servers changes with CPU architecture, kernel, worker count, and TLS implementation.

🧾 Source

The numbers come from one run of the server repository’s benchmark harness. The methodology, the rules a run must meet before a number counts, and the harness are published there:

• Benchmark methodology

Raw per-run evidence stays in the maintainer’s checkout and is not published.