RawDataAccessBencher VS FrameworkBenchmarks

Not to take anything away from Dapper (it's an excellent library), but it isn't really that much faster than EntityFramework anymore.

> EF Core 6.0 performance is now 70% faster on the industry-standard TechEmpower Fortunes benchmark, compared to 5.0.

> This is the full-stack perf improvement, including improvements in the benchmark code, the .NET runtime, etc. EF Core 6.0 itself is 31% faster executing queries.

> Heap allocations have been reduced by 43%.

> At the end of this iteration, the gap between Dapper and EF Core in the TechEmpower Fortunes benchmark narrowed from 55% to around a little under 5%.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-entity-fram...

Again, this isn't to take anything away from Dapper. It's a wonderful query library that lets you just write SQL and map your objects in such a simple manner. It's going to be something that a lot of people want. Historically, Entity Framework performance wasn't great and that may have motivated StackOverflow in the past. At this point, I don't think EF's performance is really an issue.

If you look at the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks, you can see that the Dapper and EF performance is basically identical now: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&l=z.... One fortunes test is 0.8% faster for Dapper and the other is 6.6% faster. For multiple queries, one is 5.6% faster and the other is 3.8% faster. For single queries, one is 12.2% faster and the other 12.9% faster. So yes Dapper is faster, but there isn't a huge advantage anymore - not to the point that one would say StackOverflow has tuned their code to such an amazing point that they need substantially less hardware. If they swapped EF in, they probably wouldn't notice much of a difference in performance. In fact, in the real world where apps, the gap between them is probably going to end up being less.

If we look at some other benchmarks in the community, they tell a similar story: https://github.com/FransBouma/RawDataAccessBencher/blob/mast...

In some tests, EF actually edges past Dapper since it can compile queries in advance (which just means calling `EF.CompileQuery(myQuery)` and assigning that to a static variable that will get reused.

Again, none of this is to take away from Dapper. Dapper is a wonderful, simple library. In a world where there's so many painful database libraries, Dapper is great. It shows wonderful care in its design. Entity Framework is great too and performance isn't really an interesting distinction. I love being able to use both EF and Dapper and having such amazing database access options.

But now, EF v6.0.7.0 is improved now. I just checked https://github.com/FransBouma/RawDataAccessBencher/blob/master/Results/20220801_net6.txt

In theory this is a fair approach, till you realize that an ORM is a very complex piece of machinery that takes a lot of effort to implement (The LLBLGen Pro runtime framework is 1M lines of C# code for instance). Even falling back to a micro that performs well in most situations and can deal with the queries you need to execute (!) isn't easy. Good luck beating Linq to DB's performance (Dapper is ok, but there are faster ones, check my benchmarks, they're on github).

Since 2013, TechEmpower has established a backend framework benchmark. They meticulously define benchmark specifications and maintain an open-source approach that encourages contributions from the community. This benchmark has become a respected standard in the tech industry, serving as a reliable yardstick for technology competitors to assess the performance of their solutions (exemple Go Fiber, C# Asp.net, JS Just). So I can trust the Techempower benchmark.

Interested to see how this fares on Tech Empower's benchmarks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

At the moment it is at the bottom as a "did not complete"

It seems like Rust is doing a pretty good job of applying to web apps and APIs:

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks

It would still be slower :P

At least once you start "gaming" benchmarks interpreted and/or dynamically typed languages have a strict ceiling they can't really surpass (just.js doesn't count as it's as thin wrapper on top of C as it can get)

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

(all top entries are bottlenecked by DB driver implementation and its ability to multiplex queries, and context switching cost, so those frameworks which can do perfect static partitioning and query multiplexing win out)

Neat. Thanks for sharing!

Interestingly, may-minihttp is faring very well in the TechEmpower benchmark [1], for whatever those benchmarks are worth. The code is also surprisingly straightforward [2].

[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

[2] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

ntex was formed after a schism in actix-web and Rust safety/unsafety, with ntex allowing more unsafe code for better performance.

ntex is at the top of the TechEmpower benchmarks, although those benchmarks are not apples-to-apples since each uses its own tricks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

Ruby is slow. Very slow. How much you may ask? https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s... fastest Ruby entry is at 272th place. Sure, top entries tend to have questionable benchmark-golfing implementations, but it gives you a good primer on the overhead imposed by Ruby.

It is also not early 00s anymore, when you pick an interpreted language, you are not getting "better productivity and tooling". In fact, most interpreted languages lag behind other major languages significantly in the form of JS/TS, Python and Ruby suffering from different woes when it comes to package management and publishing. I would say only TS/JS manages to stand apart with being tolerable, and Python sometimes too by a virtue of its popularity and the amount of information out there whenever you need to troubleshoot.

If you liked Go but felt it being a too verbose to your liking, give .NET a try. I am advocating for it here on HN mostly for fun but it is, in fact, highly underappreciated, considered unsexy and boring while it's anything but after a complete change of trajectory in the last 3-5 years. It is actually the* stack people secretly want but simply don't know about because it is bundled together with Java in the public perception.

*productive CLI tooling, high performance, works well in a really wide range of workloads from low to high level, by far the best ORM across all languages and back-end framework that is easier to work with than Node.JS while consuming 0.1x resources

Although that seems to have improved in recent years.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=json§...