Kotlin(-Native) as a Go alternative in 2021

8

I agree it doesn’t make much sense to compare blocking and non-blocking implementations, so I’ve tried my best to create my own benchmark comparing Go (using gin) and Kotlin (using Ktor with Netty).

Both servers implement a /static route which serves a static string and a /file/<name> route which serves the file with the given name from the data directory.

I’ve used bombardier with default settings for the tests. Because the JVM needs some time to get “hot” I’ve done multiple tests on both servers, waiting a few seconds between each of them, and took the best results for both, respectively.

The /static route:

== Kotlin
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec    118952.59    9837.47  137048.63
  Latency        1.05ms   748.43us    78.00ms
  Throughput:    19.28MB/s
== Go
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec    155828.78   12136.14  184001.84
  Latency      799.99us    97.91us    26.00ms
  Throughput:    30.77MB/s

The /file/<name> route with the test.txt file:

== Kotlin
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec     13226.78     849.23   16523.10
  Latency        9.44ms   291.74us    30.00ms
  Throughput:     2.32MB/s
== Go
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec     22838.06    1152.13   24500.61
  Latency        5.47ms     1.93ms    95.12ms
  Throughput:     5.92MB/s

I’m not an expert on Ktor nor gin (or benchmarking in general), so please tell me if I made any mistakes here. You can find the source code here.

1 Like