>> they're benchmarking raw scripts
TechEmpower uses gunicorn/nginx [1] for Python frameworks, and has since 2014.
>> all you need to do is try to do a little more processing inside your HTTP handler
Unless you're working with an external service like a relational database, in which case performance between Go/Java and Python will be comparable [2]. If you don't need to leave your process, Go/Java will flatten Python.
[1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/tree/mast...
[2] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r13&hw=...
In Top Python libraries of 2016TechEmpower
FrameworkBenchmarks
C++2013–2026
TechEmpower / FrameworkBenchmarks · Archived
FrameworkBenchmarks
Source for the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks project
143Distinct people
247Mentions
3Explicit recommenders
8.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Source for the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks project
GitHub
Where it is used
- ASP.NET Core — ASP.NET Core used the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks as a focus for performance work. Microsoft prioritized improving ASP.NET’s performance in these benchmarks. Source
- Benchmarks for ASP.NET Core — Benchmarks for ASP.NET Core includes scenarios from the TechEmpower Web Framework Benchmarks in its benchmarking suite. Source
What people are saying
Sorry, I should have been more precise. I am very, very familiar with the TechEmpower benchmarks and I first learned Java around SE 5, right after they switched from 1.x…
AaronFriel used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 7:02:50 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year247 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-03-28 15:05:31 UTC to 2026-03-24 12:37:38 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 106 | 2 | 104 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 20 | 0 | 20 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 0 | 14 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 25 | 0 | 25 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 0 | 14 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 0 | 15 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 2 | 2 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Welcome to TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks (TFB)
If you're new to the project, welcome! Please feel free to ask questions here. We encourage new frameworks and contributors to ask questions. We're here to help!
This project provides representative performance measures across a wide field of web application frameworks. With much help from the community, coverage is quite broad and we are happy to broaden it further with contributions. The project presently includes frameworks on many languages including Go, Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, C#, F#,Clojure, Groovy, Dart, JavaScript, Erlang, Haskell, Scala, Perl, Lua, C, and others. The current tests exercise plaintext responses, JSON serialization, database reads and writes via the object-relational mapper (ORM), collections, sorting, server-side templates, and XSS counter-measures. Future tests will exercise other components and greater computation.
Read more and see the results of our tests on cloud and physical hardware. For descriptions of the test types that we run, see the
test requirements section.
If you find yourself in a directory or file that you're not sure what the purpose is, checkout our file structure in our documentation, which will briefly explain the use of relevant directories and files.
Quick Start Guide
To get started developing you'll need to install docker or see our Quick Start Guide using vagrant
Clone TFB.
$ git clone https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks.git
Change directories
$ cd FrameworkBenchmarks
Run a test.
$ ./tfb --mode verify --test gemini
Explanation of the ./tfb script
The run script is pretty wordy, but each and every flag is required. If you are using windows, either adapt the docker command at the end of the ./tfb shell script (replacing ${SCRIPT_ROOT} with /c/path/to/FrameworkBenchmarks), or use vagrant.
The command looks like this: docker run -it --rm --network tfb -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v [FWROOT]:/FrameworkBenchmarks techempower/tfb [ARGS]
-it tells docker to run this in 'interactive' mode and simulate a TTY, so that ctrl+c is propagated.
--rm tells docker to remove the container as soon as the toolset finishes running, meaning there aren't hundreds of stopped containers lying around.
--network=tfb tells the container to join the 'tfb' Docker virtual network
The first -v specifies which Docker socket path to mount as a volume in the running container. This allows docker commands run inside this container to use the host container's docker to create/run/stop/remove containers.
The second -v mounts the FrameworkBenchmarks source directory as a volume to share with the container so that rebuilding the toolset image is unnecessary and any changes you make on the host system are available in the running toolset container.
techempower/tfb is the name of toolset container to run
A note on Windows
Docker expects Linux-style paths. If you cloned on your C:\ drive, then [ABS PATH TO THIS DIR] would be /c/FrameworkBenchmarks.
Docker for Windows understands /var/run/docker.sock even though that is not a valid path on Windows, but only when using Linux containers (it doesn't work with Windows containers and LCOW). Docker Toolbox may not understand /var/run/docker.sock, even when using Linux containers - use at your own risk.
Quick Start Guide (Vagrant)
Get started developing quickly by utilizing vagrant with TFB. Git,
Virtualbox and vagrant are
required.
Clone TFB.
$ git clone https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks.git
Change directories
$ cd FrameworkBenchmarks/deployment/vagrant
Build the vagrant virtual machine
$ vagrant up
Run a test
$ vagrant ssh
$ tfb --mode verify --test gemini
Add a New Test
Either on your computer, or once you open an SSH connection to your vagrant box, start the new test initialization wizard.
vagrant@TFB-all:~/FrameworkBenchmarks$ ./tfb --new
This will walk you through the entire process of creating a new test to include in the suite.
Resources
Official Documentation
Our official documentation can be found in the wiki.
If you find any errors or areas for improvement within the docs, feel free to open an issue in this repo.
Live Results
Results of continuous benchmarking runs are available in real time here.
Data Visualization
If you have a results.json file that you would like to visualize, you can do that here. You can also attach a runid parameter to that url where runid is a run listed on tfb-status like so: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=test&runid=fd07b64e-47ce-411e-8b9b-b13368e988c6.
If you want to visualize them or compare different results files on bash, here is an unofficial plaintext results parser
Contributing
The community has consistently helped in making these tests better, and we welcome any and all changes. Reviewing our contribution practices and guidelines will help to keep us all on the same page. The contribution guide can be found in the TFB documentation.
Join in the conversation in the Discussions tab, on Twitter, or chat with us on Freenode at #techempower-fwbm.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
8 sourcesHard to say what's going on there. Vert.x itself is quite speedy. The DB access module they use (http://vertx.io/docs/vertx-mysql-postgresql-client/java/) is still in technical preview so there may be legitimate issue with the module or something wrong being done (I only glanced quickly and didn't see anything immediately obvious). Vert.x really isn't much more than a pleasant facade over Netty so it's hard to imagine what's actually wrong.
It appears there may be an issue with the benchmark? https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/21...
Personally, I don't really care about benchmarks. Getting stuff done is more important at this stage. Eventually this may become more important but I'm not going to worry about it until it becomes and issue for us specifically.
In Kotlin 1.0.5 is hereI agree that good benchmarks are important. This is the Techempower benchmark, which only requires this, and is how it's implemented in most languages for Techempower. See https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/180d... for example.
Extra tests for more complex stuff would be great.
In Zero-cost futures in RustLooks like they use build with release mode:
https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...
In Shipping forgettable microservices with Rust>benchmarks are sometimes bullshit, but the idea that node's approach is somehow light years ahead just doesn't pan out in the real world.
It's in the real world where you have database connections that can't always scale to 186k/second with low latency on all responses, which is what's required to get the performance out of HHVM in the linked benchmark. In a typical architecture you may not have the database local to the PHP server, meaning latency will be much higher. And it's upstream latency that kills a synchronous connection.
And it's in the real world where a number of third party queries may be involved with a request, and those queries may take 100ms to resolve, during which time your thread is blocked in PHP whereas Node can be busy handling other requests or even other aspects of the same request (a Promise.all of a half dozen
Read the rest
simultaneous database queries, for instance).
Async approaches are light years ahead in the real world. I keep seeing references to HHVM when people try to defend PHP, so I did a Google search to find out if it supports async, and the answer is "a little bit." [1] Basically it looks like, within a single request, it can execute several queries in parallel, like my Promise.all example above. So it looks like Hack, at least, has that feature. But as far as I can tell it doesn't mix multiple connections in a single thread. And you have to be careful to use only async-aware operations or you lose the benefits; Node is designed around async behavior, so everything you're likely to use supports it by default.
Those benchmarks are in fact unrealistic. And the Node implementation in that benchmark uses a single connection to MySQL, so the 20 queries are actually executed in series instead of in parallel. [0] If they used a connection pool instead, they could all execute in parallel. Look at the numbers:
Queries 1 5 10 15 20
nodejs 85,490 22,917 12,083 8,250 6,254
hhvm 12,369 12,428 10,056 10,394 9,322
The NodeJS results shouldn't drop that fast off of the single query unless they're all using the same MySQL connection; even using just 4 connections from a pool should speed it up by a lot. Also, the HHVM source uses stored procedures while the Node version recompiles the query every time. Finally, Node can be faster when driven from Nginx, while it's using the internal Node server instead.
Here's an article I just stumbled across that talks about the limits of HHVM to accelerate PHP: [2] It touches on some of the same points. Async is the important way to speed up real world apps, and it's not the default "PHP Way."
Aside from that, probably 90% of the people using PHP are using it "normal" PHP on a hosted server in Apache and not HHVM at all. So you're basically arguing hypotheticals: "IF they use HHVM, and IF they write the code exactly right, and IF their upstream servers have really low latency all the time, then PHP isn't much slower than Node."
Node is usually faster in the real world given common coding patterns. And Node gives you Socket.IO, which pretty much kills the relevance of PHP no matter how you slice it. Even long polling would slaughter a PHP server; you'd be able to support at most one concurrent user per thread. Async servers are a good at supporting long running connections.
[0] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...
[1] https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/async/introduction
[2] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2948132/app-servers/hhvm-38...
I'm looking to transition from Rails to something more performant. Phoenix is at the top of my list, but these benchmarks worry me:
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=...
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=...
In both Phoenix has very high error rates, and in the first it seems really slow. Here is their Phoenix test app:
https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/tree/mast...
So what is going on there? Is it less of a perf win than I've heard? Is there something bad with their code?
In Go best practices, six years inbenchmark setting for Lua https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/tree/mast...
In ngx_mruby – A Fast and Memory-Efficient Mruby Extension Mechanism for Nginx> I don't see big advantages over one of the Jax-RS libraries, though.
I do, at least potentially. JAX-RS frameworks that are currently on the market add too much overhead.
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r11&hw=...
https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/search?ut...
In Pippo – Web framework in Java