Web Framework Benchmarks Round 4

I've used spring mvc in an agile setting a couple times now, and it has worked fine. It doesn't tend to make developers all that happy, in my experience. If you're in an enterprise full of spring, starting up the next app with it can be attractive -- there likely already exists a bunch of tooling and knowledge around spring.

I wouldn't use spring directly if I were trying to build something quickly for a startup. I'd be more apt to reach for grails (which wraps spring), dropwizard, or any of the other rapid-development frameworks.

Moore's law has made this sorta moot. Unless you're on Heroku, for a successful small-to-medium app, the denominator in your hosting costs is doing to be the salary of the engineer or sysadmin who tends to it.

(If you're on Heroku, then you start worrying about dynos because, with monitoring, you're paying $60 per "worker".)

This is to say, the cost in salary to properly shard a database probably outweighs a year or two of hosting for the extra two or three boxes you're spinning up; almost no one experiences explosive growth where you need to spin up dozens of new boxes overnight.

You're precisely right about how to put this data to use: as one point in a holistic decision making process. We address that in the Questions section of the site, in fact. That said, we are not reducing each framework to a single performance number. Our goal is to measure the performance of several key components of modern frameworks: database abstraction and connection pool performance, JSON serialization, list and collection functions, and server-side templates. We'd like to add even more computationally-intensive request types in future rounds.

So, no, we're not testing your (or anyone else's) specific application on each framework. But we are testing functions that your application is likely to use. You're still better off measuring the performance of your use-case on candidate frameworks before you start work, but perhaps you can first trim the field to a manageable number.

In the first round, we echoed your surprise at the spread--four orders of magnitude! I think the shifting winds of opinion come from the fact that today's high-performance languages, platforms, frameworks are not necessarily more cumbersome to use for development than the old guard. As others have pointed out elsewhere in this thread, Go is not a terribly verbose language, and yet its performance is fantastic.

Has the era of sacrificing performance at the altar of developer efficiency ended? I'm not sure. But we have some data to add to the conversation.