Swift Backend with CouchDB: Kitura vs. Vapor vs. Node.js

I made a few test projects to implement an API for my simple app to run some benchmarks. It just makes 1 request to Database and returns JSON data.

All projects was executed on Linode VPS in London:

• 2 GB RAM
• 1 CPU Core
• SSD
• 125 MBPS Out
• Ubuntu 16.10
• MySQL and CouchDB with equal data (about 13k rows/documents)

Benchmarks was run on another, more powerful dedicated server in Germany using wrk:

wrk -t4 -c20 -d5m https://my_url

Results are very different from other benchmarks by Ryan Collins.

What did I try:

• Node.js 7.0 + MySQL 5.7.16
• Node.js 7.0 + CouchDB 2.0 (via node-couchdb)
• Vapor 1.1.11 + CouchDB 2.0 (via HTTP)
• Kitura 1.1.1 + CouchDB 2.0 (via Kitura-CouchDB)

Total requests

Requests per second

Average Latency

Results are very disappointing for me. Node.js was 50% faster than Swift. It looks like it's still not the right time to make backends on Swift right now, unless you don't expect high load and just want to write in Swift.

UPDATE: after about a month I ran another tests for the new version of Vapor (1.2.5) vs. Node.js and Vapor was very very fast. So now I'm very optimistic about using Swift as a backend.