Why Workerman’s WebSocket Beats Rust and TypeScript in the New HttpArena Benchmarks

Overview

After more than 13 years of operation, the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks were archived, prompting the developer community to look for a modern, fairer performance testing platform. HttpArena (https://mda2av.github.io/HttpArena) quickly gained attention as a strong alternative, offering a unified test environment and broader protocol coverage, including HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, gRPC, and WebSocket.

Latest Benchmark Highlights

The current round runs on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX 64‑core processor with 251 GiB RAM, governor set to performance mode. The full leaderboard is available at https://mda2av.github.io/HttpArena/leaderboard/.

WebSocket Echo Test – Top Rankings

1st: workerman-websocket (PHP, WorkerMan engine, 4 096 connections) – 3,257,342 req/s, 21.77 MB/s bandwidth, 1.25 ms average latency, 7.39 ms P99 latency, ~65.78% CPU, 249.1 MiB memory.

2nd: actix-websocket (Rust, Actix engine, 3,210,189 req/s)

3rd: bun-websocket (TypeScript, Bun engine, 2,967,867 req/s)

4th: deno-websocket (TypeScript, Deno engine)

The PHP workerman‑websocket achieves over 3.2 M requests per second, surpassing implementations in languages traditionally considered high‑performance.

Why Workerman Stands Out

Asynchronous non‑blocking: Event‑driven model handles thousands of concurrent connections in a single process.

Pure PHP implementation: No extra C extensions or external web servers, simplifying deployment and eliminating the classic PHP request‑response overhead.

Extreme optimization: Maintains sub‑2 ms latency even with 4 096 connections, demonstrating efficient frame handling and message pipelines.

Compared with Laravel or Symfony WebSocket solutions, Workerman’s performance is often tens of times higher due to its resident‑memory and event‑loop design.

Value of the HttpArena Platform

Supports local Docker reproduction of tests for easy verification.

Covers a range of scenarios from simple Echo to complex mixed loads, providing results with practical relevance.

Publishes transparent hardware configurations and test parameters, avoiding the gap between lab data and production environments.

The WebSocket Echo test simulates a real‑world workflow: a handshake upgrade to --ws -p 1, followed by message echoing, measuring per‑message round‑trip throughput.

Conclusion

With TechEmpower archived, HttpArena emerges as the new benchmark standard for HTTP/WebSocket frameworks. The PHP workerman‑websocket’s top placement proves that “PHP can run fast,” offering developers a lightweight, high‑performance option for building real‑time, high‑concurrency applications.