🚀 Reverse Proxy Benchmark: Nginx vs Caddy vs Traefik vs HAProxy

Performance comparison of four popular reverse proxies using Docker, wrk load testing, and a Rust backend with CPU-intensive endpoints.

📊 Benchmark Results

Throughput & Performance

Latency Analysis

Resource Usage

Example backend used in this benchmark

The backend is built with Axum (Rust web framework) using Tokio for async runtime:

• Routes: root HTML page, /api/health health check, /api/compute/fibonacci?n=30 CPU-intensive endpoint
• Fibonacci calculation runs in spawn_blocking to prevent blocking the async runtime
• Uses iterative algorithm (not recursive) to efficiently compute Fibonacci numbers up to n=50
• CORS enabled via tower-http middleware, listening on port 3000
• Fast, memory-safe, and handles concurrent requests efficiently

🚀 Quick Start

pip install matplotlib numpy

# 1. Start services (Nginx:8080, Caddy:8081, Traefik:8082, HAProxy:8083)
docker compose up -d

# 2. Run benchmark
./benchmark.sh

# 3. Generate charts
python3 analyze_results.py

📦 Prerequisites

• Docker & Docker Compose
• Python 3 with: pip3 install matplotlib numpy
• wrk (optional - auto-uses Docker if not installed)

🎯 What Gets Tested

• Endpoint: /api/compute/fibonacci?n=30 (CPU-intensive Fibonacci calculation)
• Load: 4 threads, 100 connections, 30s duration
• Metrics: Throughput (req/s), latency (avg, p50, p75, p90, p99), CPU %, Memory MB
• Resource Limits: 1 CPU, 512MB RAM per proxy

📈 Typical Results

• Nginx: Highest throughput, lowest latency (C-based, highly optimized)
• Caddy: Good balance, automatic HTTPS (Go-based)
• Traefik: Feature-rich dynamic routing (Go-based)
• HAProxy: Enterprise-grade load balancing (C-based, high performance)

🧹 Cleanup

docker compose down
rm -rf results/ charts/