I Benchmarked fasthttp vs net/http — The Results Surprised Me

I kept hearing that fasthttp was faster than Go's standard net/http. So I decided to stop guessing and just measure it. The result? 5.6x faster. Zero heap allocations. And the benchmark is only two files. Keeping It Fair The trick to an honest benchmark: remove everything except what you're testing. Both servers use the same in-memory listener — no TCP, no network noise. Same endpoints, same response bodies. The only difference is the HTTP stack. // net/http func SimpleHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { w.Write([]byte("Hello, World!")) } // fasthttp func SimpleFastHandler(ctx *fasthttp.RequestCtx) { ctx.Write([]byte("Hello, World!")) } Same job. Very different performance. The Numbers Apple M2 Pro, Go 1.23.4 Benchmark net/http fasthttp Speedup Simple 14,449 ns/op, 63 allocs 2,563 ns/op, 0 allocs 5.6x JSON 15,561 ns/op, 72 allocs 3,136 ns/op, 6 allocs 5.0x Parallel 3,541 ns/op, 63 allocs 1,437 ns/op, 0 allocs 2.5x Zero allocations on simple requests. That's not a typo. Th