patriciomacadden/bench-micro

bench-micro is a hobby project that measures how fast different lightweight Ruby web frameworks respond to a basic "Hello World" request. The goal is to see how much overhead each framework adds on top of plain Ruby, so you can get a sense of which ones are speediest for simple tasks. The author tested eleven frameworks, ranging from bare-bones libraries like Rack and Cuba up to Sinatra and even a stripped-down Rails setup. Each one was wired up to serve a single page returning "Hello World" and then hit with a burst of requests using a tool called wrk, which fires off as many requests as it can in ten seconds. All frameworks ran under the same web server (Puma) with the same thread settings, so the only variable was the framework itself. The results show Rack handling around 7,600 requests per second, with the other frameworks scaling down to as low as about 1,100 for Ramaze. This would appeal to a developer picking a tool for a small API or microservice where raw throughput matters, or just someone curious about how these frameworks compare. The numbers give a rough hierarchy: Cuba, Brooklyn, Hobbit, and a few others sit close to Rack, while Sinatra and the minimal Rails config trail further behind. That said, the author is upfront that these are "just for fun" numbers, not scientific proof or a basis for serious decisions. A couple of caveats are worth noting. The benchmark only measures how quickly a framework can return a static string, so it ignores real-world factors like database calls, template rendering, or external API requests. The environment is also dated, running Ruby 2.0 on a 2013-era MacBook Pro, so the absolute numbers wouldn't match modern hardware or newer Ruby versions. The relative rankings might still hold, but the README doesn't claim they would.