How Rewriting Hasura Storage in Go Boosted Performance Fivefold

Hasura Storage is an open‑source service that adds a storage layer on top of Hasura and any S3‑compatible storage, leveraging Hasura’s GraphQL API, permissions, actions, and presets.

To meet growing business demands, the team rewrote the original Node.js service in Go because the Node.js version struggled with performance as user numbers scaled.

After the rewrite, Hasura Storage reported a five‑fold increase in handled service requests and a 50% reduction in memory consumption.

The Go language’s dependency and build system make it well‑suited for cloud environments.

The team has extensive Go experience.

Although Go is more verbose than Node.js, it is easy to learn and fast to write.

Performance is excellent.

Benchmarking was performed with k6, using the following test cases:

download_small_file

download_medium_file

download_large_file

download_image

download_image_manipulated

The test ramped workers from 1 to the target count over the first 10 seconds, then ran for 60 seconds, with CPU limited to 10% of the system and RAM considered unlimited.

Results showed that in every scenario the request capacity increased dramatically, especially for smaller files (up to 5×). Memory usage also improved significantly, even when handling up to five times more requests.

Response time metrics included minimum response time (baseline) and P95 (95th percentile under load). Minimum response times improved from 29 ms in Node.js to 7 ms in Go for the download_small_file case, with roughly 4× gains in most other scenarios. P95 improvements were also around 4× for most tests, with notable gains in large file downloads and image manipulation.

Images below illustrate the benchmark results and the reduction in RAM usage after the rewrite.

After the rewrite and testing, the service was deployed to production, where RAM usage on a cluster node dropped by nearly 40%, confirming a major improvement that allows serving more users and traffic without increasing overall infrastructure costs.

Overall, the Hasura Storage team concluded that the Go rewrite successfully enhanced all performance metrics while using fewer resources.