Zephyr Devlog #2

Yesterday I published my first Zephyr devlog with a list of things I wanted to tackle next: better WebSocket support, more realistic benchmarks, and measuring RAM. I expected it to be a few small improvements, but it ended up becoming a much bigger project than I thought.

A lot of this update isn’t just adding features. It involved redesigning parts of the benchmark suite, reworking parts of the server to support more realistic workloads, fixing bugs I only discovered while building those workloads, and making a number of performance improvements along the way. There were a lot of small technical decisions and trade-offs behind the scenes that took far longer than I expected.

The biggest change was throwing away the old benchmark suite entirely. It did its job, but it wasn’t measuring the kinds of workloads that real applications actually run. If I wanted Zephyr’s benchmarks to mean something, I needed to build a new suite from the ground up that tested real-world scenarios instead of just the HTTP layer. Anyways, the benchmarks are below, you can go check them out, where Zephyr is consistently top 3 in all benchmarks.