Benchmarks

All benchmarks are reproducible. Run them on your hardware — see Reproduce below.

Test setup (March 2026 run)

Hardware: 2 × AWS c7i.xlarge (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM each), cluster placement group, eu-central-1
OS: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Fairvisor: latest main from github.com/fairvisor/edge
OpenResty: 1.29.2.1 (native, no Docker)
Load generator: k6 v0.54.0 (constant-arrival-rate)
Profile: 10,000 RPS steady state, 60s run, 10s warmup
Topology: two-host — Fairvisor and k6 on separate machines (VPC private network)
Decision API method: POST /v1/decision with X-Original-Method and X-Original-URI
Reverse proxy path: includes enforcement + upstream proxy hop to backend nginx

Results at 10,000 RPS (steady state):

Percentile	Fairvisor (decision only)	Fairvisor (reverse proxy)	Raw Nginx (no rate limiting)
p50	304μs	302μs	235μs
p90	543μs	593μs	409μs
p99	2.00ms	1.79ms	1.95ms
p99.9	4.00ms	5.12ms	3.62ms

Enforcement overhead over raw Nginx baseline: p50 +69 µs / p90 +134 µs.

Max sustained throughput (single edge):

Configuration	Max RPS
Simple rate limit (1 rule)	195,000
Complex policy (5 rules, JWT parsing, loop detection)	195,000

The following memory profile is retained as a sizing reference for active limiter keys:

Memory scales roughly linearly with active limit keys because each key keeps a small fixed token-bucket state.

git clone https://github.com/fairvisor/benchmark
cd benchmark
bash run-all.sh

Results are published with every release.