Performance

Ada is designed for low overhead with zero heap allocations on the request hot path. This page documents benchmark results comparing ada against Echo and Gin.

Methodology

All benchmarks use httptest.NewRecorder + httptest.NewRequest and call ServeHTTP directly — no TCP overhead, pure router + middleware performance. Each benchmark runs with -benchmem -count=3 and reports the median result.

Environment: Go 1.26.2, Linux, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, 16 logical CPUs. Framework versions: Echo v5.3.0 and Gin v1.12.0. Results will vary by hardware — run the benchmarks yourself for your specific environment.

Source code: _examples/benchmark/

Router Benchmarks

Comparison: Ada vs Echo vs Gin

Benchmark	Ada	Echo	Gin
Static routes (5)	98.8 ns, 0 alloc	201.7 ns, 0 alloc	171.6 ns, 0 alloc
Static deep /api/v1/users/list/all	26.2 ns, 0 alloc	49.7 ns, 0 alloc	35.0 ns, 0 alloc
1 param /users/{id}	39.7 ns, 0 alloc	43.8 ns, 0 alloc	41.3 ns, 0 alloc
3 params /api/{v}/users/{id}/posts/{pid}	100.9 ns, 0 alloc	66.3 ns, 0 alloc	54.0 ns, 0 alloc
5 middlewares	33.4 ns, 0 alloc	40.9 ns, 0 alloc	50.8 ns, 0 alloc

Key Takeaways

Routing: Ada uses a full-path compressed radix trie — '/' separators live inside the radix keys, so one comparison can match several path segments at once, and the '/' bookkeeping metadata for each key is pre-computed at registration time. This makes ada the fastest of the three on static routes and single-param routes. Param-heavy paths (3+ params) remain slower than Echo/Gin because each param requires a segment-boundary stop and a stdlib-compatible SetPathValue map write per param — the price of keeping handlers as plain http.HandlerFunc with r.PathValue support.

Middleware: Ada's middleware chain is baked at registration time. All three frameworks complete the five-middleware benchmark without heap allocations. Ada is about 18% faster than Echo v5 and 34% faster than Gin in this benchmark.

Allocations: All three frameworks achieve zero heap allocations for routing. Ada uses in-place path walking (no strings.Split) and a sorted children slice (no Go map hashing).

In practice: The routing differences (a few ns to roughly 47 ns in these scenarios) are negligible for real HTTP handlers that do 1-100 ms of actual work (database queries, API calls, JSON serialization). At 100k requests/second, the entire routing overhead is less than 1% of total CPU time. Router choice should therefore consider API design and operational features alongside these synthetic hot-path results.

Ada-Only Detailed Benchmarks

Benchmark	ns/op	B/op	allocs/op
Static root /	12.44	0	0
Static short /users	18.90	0	0
Static deep /api/v1/users/list/all	19.25	0	0
1 param /users/{id}	39.06	0	0
3 params	97.29	0	0
Wildcard /files/*	43.07	0	0
50 mixed routes	41.89	0	0
200 mixed routes	46.80	0	0
404 Not Found	218.1	98	3
405 Method Not Allowed	265.6	123	4
0 middlewares	18.81	0	0
1 middleware	20.57	0	0
5 middlewares	32.20	0	0
10 middlewares	45.74	0	0
Slot (runtime reload)	25.96	0	0
Pipeline (3 entries)	30.26	0	0
Pipeline (5 entries)	35.40	0	0

Notes

• Middleware scaling: 0 to 10 middlewares adds only ~27 ns because the chain is pre-built at registration time. The per-request cost is a function-call chain, not a loop.
• Route count scaling: 50 routes to 200 routes adds only ~5 ns due to the radix trie structure — lookup is O(path length), not O(route count).
• Slot / Pipeline overhead: ~3-5 ns over an equivalent static middleware. Both use pre-built handler chains with zero allocations. The only per-request cost is one atomic pointer load. When WithTimeout variants are active, one context derivation is added per request (~400 ns); this cost is only paid when timeout-based cancellation is in use.
• 404/405 allocations: The remaining allocations on these paths come from stdlib http.Error / http.NotFound (header map write + body formatting). The middleware chain itself is pre-built at registration time and allocation-free per request.

Optimizations

Ada's router achieves its performance through several key optimizations:

• Full-path compressed radix trie: '/' separators are part of the radix keys, so consecutive static segments compress into a single key and one memequal comparison can consume several segments. Param/wildcard alternatives anchor at segment-start nodes and are only consulted on static dead ends.
• Sorted children slice: Trie child lookups use a sorted []staticChild slice with linear scan instead of a Go map[byte]*node. For the typical 1-4 children per node, linear scan on contiguous memory (~0.5 ns) is significantly faster than Go map hashing (~8 ns).
• Inlined node structure: Static trie fields (StaticKey, StaticChildren) are inlined directly in the node struct, eliminating a pointer dereference per trie level and improving cache locality.
• Pre-computed key slash metadata: The position of the last '/' and the '/' count of each radix key are computed once at registration time and stored on the node, so per-request segment bookkeeping avoids strings.LastIndexByte / strings.Count on every key hop.
• In-place path walking: Request paths are walked byte-wise without allocating a []string slice. Wildcard values are reconstructed via substring of the original path.
• Pre-chained error handlers: The 404/405 middleware chains are composed at registration time, not per request. The Allow header for 405/auto-OPTIONS responses is pre-computed on each node at registration.
• Pre-built middleware chains: Middleware is composed into a single handler closure at route registration time. Per-request cost is zero — no chain resolution, no allocation, no loop.
• Slice-based method dispatch: Per-node method handlers live in a small []methodEntry slice scanned linearly instead of a map[string]http.HandlerFunc. For the typical 1-4 methods per node, a string comparison beats map hashing. The entry also carries the route pattern and pre-computed param names, so dispatch resolves handler, pattern, and params in a single lookup with no wrapper closure.
• Pre-built Slot/Pipeline chains: Both Slot and Pipeline pre-build handler chains at mutation time (not per-request). The hot path is one atomic pointer load (~1 ns) with zero allocations. Cancel contexts for WithTimeout variants are opt-in — only created when timeout-based cancellation is actually used.
• Leak-free context merging: When WithTimeout is active, mergeContexts returns a cleanup function that deregisters watchers from the generation context, preventing unbounded memory growth across requests.
• Direct method strings: HTTP methods from net/http are already uppercase per RFC 7230, so no strings.ToUpper conversion is needed.

Running Benchmarks

Ada-only benchmarks

# From the repository root
go test -bench=. -benchmem -count=3 .

Framework comparison

# From _examples/benchmark/
go test -bench=. -benchmem -count=3 .

Comparison with benchstat

For statistically rigorous comparison:

cd _examples/benchmark
go test -bench=BenchmarkAda -benchmem -count=10 . > ada.txt
go test -bench=BenchmarkEcho -benchmem -count=10 . > echo.txt
go test -bench=BenchmarkGin -benchmem -count=10 . > gin.txt
# Use benchstat to compare (go install golang.org/x/perf/cmd/benchstat@latest)