Drogon: The C++ Framework That Tops HTTP/2 Benchmarks (And Where It Struggles)

I've been digging through HttpArena benchmark data lately — it's an open benchmark suite that tests HTTP frameworks across a bunch of realistic scenarios — and Drogon caught my eye. It's quietly one of the most interesting performers in the entire dataset. Let me walk you through what I found. What is Drogon? Drogon is a C++ web framework built on top of its own async networking library (Trantor). It's been around since 2018, and it's designed for high-performance HTTP services. Think of it as what you'd reach for if you need raw C++ speed but don't want to hand-roll everything from scratch. The HttpArena implementation uses Drogon v1.9.10, compiled with -O3 -flto (link-time optimization), running on Ubuntu 24.04. C++17, CMake build, nothing exotic. The Numbers Baseline (Plain Text Response) In the standard baseline test, Drogon lands #7 out of 30 frameworks across all connection levels: Connections RPS Avg Latency P99 Latency Memory 512 1,928,561 264μs 1.61ms 81.7 MiB 4,096 2,249,513