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I'll never forget that Friday afternoon. As the technical lead of an internet company, I was in a conference room reporting to our CEO about the performance issues of our latest project. It was a real-time data processing system, originally designed to handle 1 million records per day, but on the very first day of launch, it faced a traffic 冲击 of 3 million. The server's CPU usage skyrocketed to 95%, and response times jumped from the usual 50ms to 2 full seconds. Monitoring system alarms blared one after another.
The CEO frowned and asked me: "Did we choose the wrong technology stack?"
That question hit me like a heavy punch. As a veteran with 40 years of backend development experience, I've always been confident in my technology choices. But reality gave me a resounding slap.
That evening, I stayed alone in the office, beginning to re-examine our technology choices. We were using Node.js with the Express framework, chosen for simple reasons: the team was familiar with it, development was fast, and the ecosystem was rich. These reasons seemed impeccable at the time, but the performance data mercilessly pierced this beautiful illusion.
I decided to do a thorough performance test and let the data speak. I selected seven mainstream backend frameworks and conducted strict stress tests under identical hardware conditions. The results shocked me.
Node.js could only manage 139,412 QPS with 360 concurrent connections, with an average latency of 2.58ms. The best-performing framework, however, achieved 324,323 QPS with an average latency of just 1.46ms. This wasn't a difference of tens of percent—it was a full 134%!
Even more shocking was the performance in short connection scenarios. When Keep-Alive was disabled, Node.js's QPS dropped further to 28,286, while that best-performing framework still maintained 51,031 QPS.
I realized we weren't facing a problem that could be solved by simple tuning, but a fundamental difference in underlying architecture.
Let me detail the implementation of this performance monster. It's a web framework based on Rust, and its design philosophy amazed even this old veteran. The entire server is configured and run through a unified, coherent object, with middleware and hooks simply being async functions that receive a Context object. There are no more callbacks that need to be remembered and called. I just write my code. The streaming API for building servers and responses is extremely pleasant to use, guiding me to build applications in the right way.
What impressed me most was its async mechanism. After version 4.0.0, this framework fully embraced async for performance, removing all synchronous middleware and routes. This decision brought huge performance improvements, with QPS increasing by 100k+ when keep-alive was enabled.
Its WebSocket and Server-Sent Events (SSE) support is also native. Unlike other frameworks that require separate libraries to be installed and configured, this framework treats real-time communication as a first-class citizen. I can handle HTTP requests, WebSocket connections, and SSE streams on the same Context object, and this consistency makes my code exceptionally clean and maintainable.
Connection management is also a strength of this framework. I can easily get and control connection states, including abort, close, and Keep-Alive status. This fine-grained control allows me to build more robust and efficient real-time applications.
In terms of security, this framework inherits all the advantages of the Rust language. I no longer have to worry about SQL injection, XSS, buffer overflows, and other security vulnerabilities. The compiler can help me discover most errors at compile time, which lets me sleep soundly late at night.
After this testing, I submitted a detailed migration report to our technical director. I recommended that we migrate our core services to this Rust-based framework. The reasoning was simple: our project has high performance requirements and needs long-term maintenance. Although Rust has a steep learning curve, the performance gains and code quality improvements are worth it in the long run.
After reading my report, the technical director asked me: "Which framework do you think suits us best?"
I thought for a moment and said: "This performance monster. Its performance numbers are impressive, and more importantly, its API design is very friendly, the documentation is clear, and learning and using it won't be too difficult."
The technical director nodded: "Let's give it a try then."
Over the next two weeks, I began the migration work. Honestly, I was pretty nervous at first. After all, this was a running production project, and we couldn't afford any problems.
But the actual migration process went much smoother than I expected. The framework's documentation is very detailed, and the community is also very active. When I encountered problems, I could always find solutions quickly. More importantly, I found that my code quality was improving, and development efficiency was also increasing.
After the migration was complete, we conducted a comprehensive stress test. The results were exciting: under the same hardware configuration, our system could easily handle the previous traffic peak, with CPU usage dropping below 40% and response times stabilizing within 50 milliseconds.
After reviewing the test report, the CEO came over specifically to pat me on the shoulder: "Well done, this solved a major problem for us."
I smiled, but thought to myself: this not only solved the current problem, but also laid a solid technical foundation for our future development.
In my 40 years of crawling and rolling in the software industry, I've witnessed the rise and fall of countless technologies. I've ridden the waves of technology and seen them crash on the shores of reality. This experience made me understand a principle: choosing the right underlying technology stack is like choosing a rock-solid foundation for your skyscraper. If the foundation isn't solid, even the most gorgeous building will collapse.
Performance is not an option; it is the lifeline of a service. In this era of traffic explosion, if your technology stack cannot handle the challenges of high concurrency, then no matter how perfect your business logic is, it will ultimately be defeated by cruel reality.
The shock this Rust-based framework gave me wasn't just about performance. It showed me what a modern web framework should look like: simple, efficient, secure, and easy to use. It doesn't try to be an all-encompassing, universal framework; it focuses on doing one thing—being an extremely excellent web server—and it achieves this in an elegant way I haven't seen in a long time.
I feel like I've spent 40 years using various tools to build skyscrapers, and now someone has handed me a set of precision-machined industrial tools. This isn't just another framework; it's a philosophical declaration. It firmly believes that you can have performance, security, and world-class developer experience all at once.
This is a return to simplicity, and I, as part of it, will never look back.
Looking back, I'm grateful for that Friday afternoon's performance issue. It was this crisis that gave me the opportunity to re-examine my technology choices and discover this performance monster. Sometimes, crises often contain opportunities for transformation. The key is whether we are willing to step out of our comfort zones to embrace new technologies that might change the rules of the game.
In this era of rapid technological development, every one of us technical personnel should maintain an open and learning mindset. Sticking to familiar technology stacks is certainly safe, but this might also miss opportunities that can bring qualitative leaps.
My 40 years of experience tell me that true technical experts don't know everything, but they know which technology is best for solving which problems. And now, I can say with certainty that for web applications that require high performance, high concurrency, and high security, this Rust-based framework is undoubtedly one of the best choices.
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