Zephyr Devlog #1

This week I focused on getting the core of Zephyr working and making it as fast as possible.

What I built

• Core HTTP server using Hyper
• Router with support for static and dynamic routes
• Static file serving
• Plugin system
• Metrics for tracking requests
• Benchmark suite to compare Zephyr with other frameworks

Bugs I fixed

I found a few bugs while writing integration tests:

• Body size limits weren’t always enforced.
• If-None-Match headers weren’t working correctly.
• The rate limiter rewrote some valid configs.

These were all fixed after writing more tests.

Performance

After benchmarking, I realised the server wasn’t using all CPU cores efficiently. I rewrote the threading model so each worker had its own runtime, which increased throughput by about 45%.

Current plaintext benchmark:

| Framework | Requests/sec |
| Zephyr | 321k |
| actix-web | 314k |
| Node.js (cluster) | 266k |

I’m happy that Zephyr is now competitive with one of the fastest Rust web frameworks.

Next

• Better WebSocket support
• Streaming static files
• More realistic benchmarks (JSON, databases, uploads)
• More plugin improvements
• Benchmarking things like RAM usage too
  Overall I’m really happy with how the project is progressing. The biggest lesson this week was to benchmark before assuming something is the bottleneck.