Performance Benchmarks
As a critical component of your architecture, the API Gateway has an obligation to deliver high performance throughput and latency of your API traffic, regardless of what it looks like.
The world’s biggest companies trust Tyk to deliver exceptional API experiences.
Performance Matters
Tyk’s performance advantage stems from strategic architectural decisions that prioritize speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Our comprehensive testing across multiple cloud environments demonstrates consistent superior performance that translates directly to business value for our customers.
Golang
foundation
All Tyk components are built using Go (Golang), the same language powering Kubernetes and Docker. As a compiled language, Go delivers typically 40 times faster performance than Python and significantly outperforms Lua – the language used by competing API Gateway vendors like Nginx, Apache APISIX, and Kong.
Business impact through performance
Superior performance directly translates to better user experience and reduced infrastructure costs. Higher throughput and lower latency mean your API gateway becomes a business enabler rather than a bottleneck, allowing you to serve more customers with fewer resources while maintaining exceptional service quality.
Rigorous
multi-cloud testing
Our performance benchmarks are validated through comprehensive testing across AWS, GCP, and Azure using 4 different machine classes on each platform. We measure Request Per Second (RPS) and 99th percentile latency (P99) through multiple 5-minute test runs, ensuring consistent and reliable performance metrics across diverse cloud environments.
These performance advantages ensure that Tyk not only meets your current API management needs but scales efficiently as your business grows, providing long-term value through reduced operational costs and enhanced user satisfaction.
Tyk Middleware Analysis
Analytics
Analytics recording enabled
Analytics
Analytics recording enabled
Auth
Encrypted API key authentication enabled
Auth & Quota
Encrypted API key authentication enabled as well as quota management
Rate-limiting
API-level rate-limiting enabled
All
All the above middleware functions enabled
Vanilla
Tyk is configured as a transparent reverse proxy, with no middleware
There are multiple factors that affect performance, such as payload sizes, connection type / length, the hardware itself, SSL considerations, which Tyk features are enabled, and more. Considerable care was taken to minimise the confounding variables and in the interest of transparency we have open sourced our entire testing methodology.
With that said, Tyk is clearly capable of handling substantial amounts of traffic, and as one would expect, scales efficiently with hardware.
In this section. We are testing Tyk with various middleware functions enabled. Here is breakdown of all the conducted tests:
Automated performance testing using ansible
The metrics in this article was generated using our performance testing open source repository.
You may become familiar with the repository and use it yourself by watching Tyk’s Zaid Albirawi Introduction to Tyk Ansible Performance Testing.
You may also reproduce all the results on your own infrastructure. The following folder contains the shell scripts to generate all the metrics used in this article.
Tyk vs Kong
In the following tests. Tyk and Kong are benchmarked against one another with different plugins enabled. The Kong plugins tested against Tyk’s native authentication, rate-limiting and quota functionalities are:
- Key Authentication – Does not encrypt API keys
- Rate Limiting
Summary of results:
In vanilla testing Tyk and Kong achieve very similar results. This is expected, as both gateways are acting as transparent reverse proxies with minimal computational overhead. In practice however, one would expect to leverage an API gateway to take advantage of features such as rate limiting and authentication. In a real world use case, Tyk outperforms Kong on all three major cloud providers in both the RPS and P99 metrics. Note that as hardware allocation increases, there is almost a linear scaling to the performance of Tyk, indicating an extremely efficient use of resources. The same cannot be said for Kong, which does not appear to scale as effectively past 8 cores. This behaviour is consistent across all 3 major cloud providers.
Tyk vs Apollo
In the following tests, we aim to model and compare the performance of Tyk’s Universal Data Graph versus Apollo’s RESTDataSource at different graph query depths.
Note: As Tyk is built in Go with native multithreading, we ran Apollo in multithreaded mode with the npm cluster library.
Query depth 1
- 1 user
Query depth 2
2 REST requests
- 1 user
- 10 posts
Query depth 3
12 REST requests
- 1 user
- 10 posts
- 100 comments
{
user(id: ID) {
username
name
email
}
}{
user(id: ID) {
username
name
email
posts {
title
body
}
}
}{
user(id: ID) {
username
name
email
posts {
title
body
comments {
name
email
body
}
}
}
}Summary of results:
Tyk and Apollo both achieve similar API performance on a machine with 2 cores. However, as resource allocation increases, the performance delta between the two dramatically increases with Tyk outperforming Apollo across all major cloud providers. This illustrates Tyk’s ability to scale efficiently and effectively with hardware.
Tyk vs Gravitee
Throughput
Tyk consistently delivered higher requests per second (RPS) across all test scenarios
Latency
Lower P99 latency times, particularly under high load conditions
Resource efficiency
Better CPU and memory utilization, resulting in lower infrastructure costs
Scalability
Superior performance maintenance as concurrent user loads increased
Tyk Gartner reviews
Tyk compared