Benchmarking Node.js Frameworks – Brahma-JS vs uWS vs Fastify vs Express

Recently, I conducted a performance benchmark on four backend frameworks — Express, Fastify, Brahma-JS (my own creation), and uWebSockets.js (uws-js). The tests were conducted using autocannon directly against each live-deployed API on a minimal EC2 t2.micro instance.

⚙️ Benchmark Setup:
• autocannon is a Node.js-based HTTP benchmarking tool, similar to wrk, designed to generate high levels of concurrent requests.
• Client-side load was generated with:
  – Connections: 100
  – Duration: 10s per test
  – Pipelining: 50
  – Workers: 2
• Server environment: AWS EC2 t2.micro (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, EBS-backed SSD).
• Since this instance has only a single CPU core (burstable), enabling clustering offers no advantage — all benchmarks were run in a single-process mode.

Surprisingly, Express ended up as the lowest performing candidate, while Fastify was slightly better. Brahma-JS performed impressively, though uWS remained the fastest overall.

🐇 Express.js

Git: https://github.com/expressjs/express

Express is well known for its simplicity, but it's not optimized for high concurrency or raw performance.

📊 Results: 54k requests, ~3k failed (timeouts)

⚡ Fastify

Git: https://github.com/fastify/fastify

Fastify is a performance-focused alternative to Express. It showed a solid improvement over Express.

📊 Results: 307k requests

🌀 Brahma-JS (Custom Framework)

Git: https://github.com/Shyam20001/rsjs

Brahma-JS is my own minimalist, high-performance Node.js framework. It uses a lean architecture and async primitives. It performed impressively, close to uWS.

            🔧 Runtime & Design:

            • Core runtime powered by Rust Tokio (async runtime) + Hyper (HTTP engine)

            • Bound to Node.js via But also can be used in Deno as well as Bun.
            • Binary-only distribution — no need to compile or manage dependencies

            • Designed as a “fire-and-forget” orchestrator with ultra-fast message routing

            • API surface aims to feel like Express/Hono while staying minimal

📊 Results: 413k requests

🚀 uWebSockets.js (uws-js)

Git: https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets.js

uWS is known for being one of the fastest web frameworks out there — built in C++ with Node.js bindings. Its performance remains stellar, though its ergonomics aren’t as friendly as others.

📊 Results: 456k requests

📊 Summary

This test proves that raw performance isn’t always about using the most popular tool — thoughtful design and minimal overhead in frameworks like Brahma-JS or uWS can bring massive benefits in constrained environments like t2.micro.

🔥 Try Brahma-JS Right Now

Get started instantly with the NPM package:

npm i brahma-firelight

🌟 Explore on NPM