Fun experiment, try and benchmark a simple file download on a simple web server using rocket.rs (which also uses tokio and hyper, and has a built in fileserver type, so just a few lines of code) and compare it to a vanilla nginx config.
Here’s the rocket.rs source I used:
#[rocket::main]
async fn main() -> Result {
rocket::build()
.mount("/", rocket::fs::FileServer::from("/tmp/test"))
.ignite()
.await?
.launch()
.await?;
Ok(())
}
And do `mkdir /tmp/test && dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/test/bigfile bs=1G count1` to create a 1G file, and run `time curl -o /dev/null localhost:8000/bigfile`.
My nginx config:
worker_processes auto;
master_process off;
pid /dev/null;
events {}
http {
sendfile on;
access_log /dev/stdout;
error_log /dev/stderr;
server {
listen 8089;
server_name localhost;
root /tmp/test;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
}
}
launched with `nginx -c "$(pwd)"/nginx.conf -g "daemon off;"`
The results for a 1GB file for
me on an nvme ssd, averaged over 100 runs:
nginx: 150ms
rocket: 4 seconds
Or roughly 25x slower. Release mode makes no difference.
You can definitely write slow code in rust if you’re naive about reading/writing between channels a few kilobytes at a time, which is what rocket does, vs using sendfile(2), like nginx does.
Edit: These numbers were from a few months ago... I tried it again by just pasting the above into a new project with `cargo init` and adding rocket and tokio to my deps, and it's now 2.3s in debug and 1.2s in release mode. It may have improved since a few months ago, but it's still 10x slower.