PAGI::Server Performance and Hardening

Source: Dev.to

Performance Test

PAGI::Server is the reference implementation of the PAGI spec. Below is a high‑concurrency test of a basic “Hello world” app:

https://github.com/jjn1056/pagi/blob/main/examples/01-hello-http/app.pl

The test was run on a MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz 8‑Core Intel Core i9) using the following command:

LIBEV_FLAGS=8 ./bin/pagi-server --workers 16 --quiet --no-access-log --loop EV ./examples/01-hello-http/app.pl

Results

% hey -z 30s -c 500 http://localhost:5000/

Summary:
  Total:    30.0217 secs
  Slowest:  0.1110 secs
  Fastest:  0.0097 secs
  Average:  0.0312 secs
  Requests/sec: 16010.2544

Response time histogram:
  0.010 [1] |
  0.020 [376]   |
  0.030 [222649]    |■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
  0.040 [226482]    |■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
  0.050 [26058] |■■■■■
  0.060 [4279]  |■
  0.070 [492]   |
  0.081 [123]   |
  0.091 [173]   |
  0.101 [20]    |
  0.111 [2] |

Latency distribution:
  10% in 0.0249 secs
  25% in 0.0273 secs
  50% in 0.0304 secs
  75% in 0.0340 secs
  90% in 0.0381 secs
  95% in 0.0414 secs
  99% in 0.0505 secs

Details (average, fastest, slowest):
  DNS+dialup:   0.0000 secs, 0.0097 secs, 0.1110 secs
  DNS-lookup:   0.0000 secs, 0.0000 secs, 0.0193 secs
  req write:    0.0000 secs, 0.0000 secs, 0.0091 secs
  resp wait:    0.0311 secs, 0.0096 secs, 0.1110 secs
  resp read:    0.0000 secs, 0.0000 secs, 0.0035 secs

Status code distribution:
  [200] 480655 responses

PAGI::Server handled all requests, delivering about 30 % higher throughput than a comparable PSGI “Hello world” running under Starman. Starman, in contrast, dropped roughly 80 % of the requests at the same load on the same hardware, illustrating why Starman is typically placed behind an edge server such as Nginx.

Compliance and Security Testing

Ongoing HTTP/WebSocket compliance and security testing for PAGI::Server can be followed in the working draft:

https://github.com/jjn1056/pagi/blob/main/lib/PAGI/Server/Compliance.pod

Volunteers with experience in stress‑testing servers are welcome to contribute. In production environments you’ll still likely run PAGI::Server behind a proxy or edge server (e.g., Nginx), but the more robust it is on its own, the better.