We love this!

If you’ve not been watching the ASP.NET team’s community standups, you have missed some surprisingly transparent, interesting, and oftentimes funny updates from a major web application framework development team. Every time I watch one I marvel, this is Microsoft? Clearly we’re seeing a new Microsoft.

If you’re not watching, you would have also missed how much emphasis the ASP.NET team is putting on performance.

Recently, they reached 1.15 million plaintext requests per second from ASP.NET Core within their test environment. As Ben Adams writes in his article detailing the achievement, that is 23 times better than prior to the start of optimization work within the framework!

Big congratulations are in order. Not only for the specific achievement, or for the continued performance tuning to come, but also for what it represents: a concerted effort to make the platform provide application developers as much performance headroom as possible.

As we discussed in our previous entry, a high performance platform/framework gives application developers the freedom to build more quickly by deferring performance tuning within the application’s domain. We’ll have more to say on that in the future.

For the time being, we wanted to join the celebration of the ASP.NET team and toot our own horn a bit. We’re proud of this from our own point of view because the Framework Benchmarks project inspired Microsoft’s team to focus on performance. They could have dismissed it as unimportant, but instead they saw the value and attacked performance with conviction.

We started the Framework Benchmarks project to collect data about performance. As the project has matured, we’ve realized it has a new, perhaps even more important reason for being: encouraging both application developers and framework creators to think more about performance. We have been absolutely floored by how many GitHub-hosted projects aim to join or improve their positioning within the project. Or even win outright, though just aiming for the high-performance tier is a reasonable goal for us mere mortals.

We deeply feel that competition of this sort is a good thing. It helps motivate performance improvement across the web framework ecosystem and that in turn improves performance of thousands of web applications. It makes us tremendously happy to see so many people striving to build the best performance into their frameworks and platforms.

So congratulations to the ASP.NET team for giving performance such attention. And to everyone else doing the same in their respective frameworks. And thank you to everyone who has and continues to participate in the benchmarks project. May all your requests be fulfilled in mere milliseconds!