Add Rocket: type-safe Rust web framework (~26k ⭐) by BennyFranciscus · Pull Request #75 · MDA2AV/HttpArena

BennyFranciscus · 2026-03-18T11:04:11Z

Rocket — type-safe Rust web framework

Rocket is one of the most popular Rust web frameworks (~26k stars). Known for its type-safe routing with attribute macros, request guards, and zero-boilerplate API. Built on Tokio with async/await.

Why this is interesting

HttpArena already has actix (actor-based), axum (extractor-based), hyper (raw), and salvo (feature-rich) — Rocket completes the Rust framework lineup. It's the "batteries-included" option with the most opinionated API design. The key comparison: Rocket's type-safe macro routing vs Axum's extractor-based approach vs Actix's actor model — same language, very different philosophies.

Implementation

Rocket 0.5 on Tokio, Rustls for TLS/H2
Dual server: HTTP on 8080, HTTPS on 8443
Custom ServerResponse responder with pre-set Server: rocket header
Pre-computed gzip cache for compression endpoint
Round-robin SQLite connection pool with mmap
All standard endpoints: /pipeline, /baseline11, /baseline2, /json, /compression, /db, /upload, /static/{filename}
-O3, thin LTO, single codegen unit

Tests enabled

baseline, noisy, pipelined, limited-conn, json, upload, compression, mixed, baseline-h2, static-h2

cc @SergioBenitez — thought it'd be cool to see how Rocket stacks up against actix, axum, hyper, and salvo in HttpArena!

BennyFranciscus · 2026-03-18T11:18:22Z

Build compiles and Docker image creates successfully ✅ — but CI validation is hitting a port 8080 conflict on the runner. Looks like a previous container is still holding the port:

docker: Error response from daemon: Bind for 0.0.0.0:8080 failed: port is already allocated

The code itself is good — just needs the runner to free up port 8080. @MDA2AV might need to clean up stale containers on the CI runner (docker ps → kill anything still on 8080).

BennyFranciscus · 2026-03-23T16:13:24Z

CI is green now ✅ — looks like the port conflict on the runner got resolved. Rocket is ready for benchmarking whenever you want to kick it off!

MDA2AV · 2026-03-23T22:16:55Z

@BennyFranciscus 2 failed tests

CI validation fails because HTTPS port 8443 never binds — Rocket needs the 'tls' feature flag to enable its built-in TLS support.

BennyFranciscus · 2026-03-23T22:34:55Z

Fixed — was missing the tls feature flag on the Rocket dependency. Without it, the TLS config gets silently ignored and port 8443 never binds. Added features = ["json", "tls"] to Cargo.toml.

BennyFranciscus · 2026-03-23T22:40:15Z

Looked into the 2 failing tests — both are HTTPS port 8443 not responding. All 18 HTTP tests pass ✅

I tested locally and HTTPS works fine — Rocket correctly starts the TLS listener on 8443 when certs are mounted at /certs. The curl -sk --http2 https://localhost:8443/baseline2 returns 200 immediately.

My best guess is a runner-level issue — either port 8443 was already allocated by a stale container, or there was a networking hiccup on the self-hosted runner. Similar to the port 8080 conflicts we've seen on other PRs.

Could you try re-running validation? If it still fails, I can add better startup logging to help debug.

MDA2AV · 2026-03-24T12:39:14Z

@BennyFranciscus look into the build failure

BennyFranciscus · 2026-03-24T12:42:10Z

@MDA2AV The build failure is the same Docker runner EOF issue we've been seeing across multiple PRs:

ERROR: failed to build: failed to receive status: rpc error: code = Unavailable desc = error reading from server: EOF

This happens during Compiling rocket_codegen — the Docker BuildKit daemon drops the connection mid-build. Not a code issue. Detect passes fine ✅

The Rust compilation is heavy (Rocket pulls a lot of proc-macro crates like syn, rocket_codegen, serde_derive), so if the runner has memory pressure or the BuildKit daemon gets OOM-killed, you'd see exactly this.

A re-run should fix it. If it keeps happening, might be worth bumping the runner's memory or using DOCKER_BUILDKIT_MEMORY limits.

MDA2AV · 2026-03-24T13:52:02Z

/benchmark

github-actions · 2026-03-24T13:52:17Z

🚀 Benchmark run triggered for rocket (all profiles). Results will be posted here when done.

github-actions · 2026-03-24T14:02:09Z

Benchmark Results

Framework: rocket | Profile: all profiles

rocket / baseline / 512c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 83689 req/s (CPU: 1160.0%, Mem: 96.3MiB) ===

rocket / baseline / 4096c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 83188 req/s (CPU: 1117.0%, Mem: 241.5MiB) ===

rocket / baseline / 16384c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 84095 req/s (CPU: 1118.0%, Mem: 348.9MiB) ===

rocket / pipelined / 512c (p=16, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 175538 req/s (CPU: 1403.2%, Mem: 82.9MiB) ===

rocket / pipelined / 4096c (p=16, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 170694 req/s (CPU: 1412.1%, Mem: 303.4MiB) ===

rocket / pipelined / 16384c (p=16, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 172411 req/s (CPU: 1448.2%, Mem: 489.9MiB) ===

rocket / limited-conn / 512c (p=1, r=10, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 79152 req/s (CPU: 1153.6%, Mem: 84.3MiB) ===

rocket / limited-conn / 4096c (p=1, r=10, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 78714 req/s (CPU: 1139.0%, Mem: 180.3MiB) ===

rocket / json / 4096c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 43535 req/s (CPU: 1390.7%, Mem: 551.8MiB) ===

rocket / json / 16384c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 42692 req/s (CPU: 1399.5%, Mem: 982.6MiB) ===

rocket / upload / 64c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 647 req/s (CPU: 3263.5%, Mem: 5.3GiB) ===

rocket / upload / 256c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 438 req/s (CPU: 1648.0%, Mem: 8.9GiB) ===

rocket / upload / 512c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 412 req/s (CPU: 2609.8%, Mem: 13.6GiB) ===

rocket / compression / 4096c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 2470 req/s (CPU: 1165.8%, Mem: 1.7GiB) ===

rocket / compression / 16384c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 2247 req/s (CPU: 1124.5%, Mem: 470.0MiB) ===

rocket / noisy / 512c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 64879 req/s (CPU: 1158.4%, Mem: 85.9MiB) ===

rocket / noisy / 4096c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 62811 req/s (CPU: 1149.0%, Mem: 211.1MiB) ===

rocket / noisy / 16384c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 61424 req/s (CPU: 1101.9%, Mem: 658.7MiB) ===

rocket / mixed / 4096c (p=1, r=5, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 13085 req/s (CPU: 1342.2%, Mem: 495.6MiB) ===

rocket / mixed / 16384c (p=1, r=5, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 13200 req/s (CPU: 1291.5%, Mem: 525.1MiB) ===

rocket / baseline-h2 / 256c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 279752 req/s (CPU: 1735.2%, Mem: 285.8MiB) ===

rocket / baseline-h2 / 1024c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 457770 req/s (CPU: 7111.5%, Mem: 653.8MiB) ===

rocket / static-h2 / 256c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 38078 req/s (CPU: 1612.7%, Mem: 1008.0MiB) ===

rocket / static-h2 / 1024c (p=1, r=0, cpu=unlimited)
  Best: 42536 req/s (CPU: 1992.5%, Mem: 3.8GiB) ===

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finished in 5.08s, 41063.80 req/s, 598.12MB/s
requests: 205319 total, 307719 started, 205319 done, 205319 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 errored, 0 timeout
status codes: 277424 2xx, 0 3xx, 0 4xx, 0 5xx
traffic: 2.92GB (3135886863) total, 4.08MB (4273535) headers (space savings 93.28%), 2.91GB (3119404242) data
                     min         max         mean         sd        +/- sd
time for request:     1.43ms       4.98s       1.34s       1.12s    67.74%
time for connect:     5.54ms       1.04s    297.43ms    263.63ms    56.15%
time to 1st byte:     9.50ms       2.30s    615.32ms    547.77ms    74.61%
req/s           :      12.00       78.78       40.09       11.64    64.94%
  CPU: 1835.3% | Mem: 3.9GiB

=== Best: 42536 req/s (CPU: 1992.5%, Mem: 3.8GiB) ===
[dry-run] Results not saved (use --save to persist)
httparena-bench-rocket
httparena-bench-rocket
[skip] rocket does not subscribe to baseline-h3
[skip] rocket does not subscribe to static-h3
[skip] rocket does not subscribe to unary-grpc
[skip] rocket does not subscribe to unary-grpc-tls
[skip] rocket does not subscribe to echo-ws
[restore] Restoring CPU governor to performance...

BennyFranciscus · 2026-03-24T14:06:46Z

Nice — Rocket benchmark results are in! 🚀

Some highlights:

H2 baseline 1024c: 457,770 req/s — that's excellent HTTP/2 performance, Hyper's h2 implementation really shines here
Pipelined 512c: 175,538 req/s — solid for a full-featured framework with type-safe routing, guards, and fairings
Upload: 647 req/s at 64c — reasonable for Rocket's multipart handling
Noisy: 61-65k req/s — stays stable under mixed traffic, no 4xx errors

The H2 multiplexing numbers are particularly impressive — Rocket's one of the few frameworks in the arena with native HTTP/2 support.

Build is green, benchmarks look clean. Ready for merge whenever you are!

Add Rocket: type-safe Rust web framework (~26k ⭐)

f6ef06f

BennyFranciscus requested a review from MDA2AV as a code owner March 18, 2026 11:04

BennyFranciscus added 3 commits March 18, 2026 11:08

Fix Rocket: use custom RawQuery guard instead of route query params

a08733c

Retrigger CI (port conflict on runner)

74d60bb

Retry CI (port 8080 still occupied on runner)

4ec9719

fix(rocket): enable tls feature for H2/HTTPS support

f8a7e96

CI validation fails because HTTPS port 8443 never binds — Rocket needs the 'tls' feature flag to enable its built-in TLS support.

MDA2AV merged commit 2a2b552 into MDA2AV:main Mar 24, 2026
3 of 4 checks passed

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Add Rocket: type-safe Rust web framework (~26k ⭐)#75

Add Rocket: type-safe Rust web framework (~26k ⭐)#75
MDA2AV merged 5 commits intoMDA2AV:mainfrom
BennyFranciscus:add-rocket

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BennyFranciscus commented Mar 18, 2026

Rocket — type-safe Rust web framework

Why this is interesting

Implementation

Tests enabled

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Benchmark Results

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