ruta

Router benchmark

Re-runnable benchmark comparing ruta against nikic/fast-route and symfony/routing under various configurations.

Running it

The benchmark is a standalone composer project so the comparison libraries never become dependencies of ruta itself (ruta is pulled in through a path repository):

cd benchmark
composer install
php run.php

It can also be run on demand from GitHub via the manually triggered Benchmark workflow (Actions → Benchmark → Run workflow), which prints the result tables to the job summary.

For numbers closer to a production web request, enable opcache for the CLI run:

php -d opcache.enable_cli=1 run.php

Options

--routes=60,600,1200   comma separated route-set sizes
--shapes=rest,static   route-set shapes to benchmark
--subjects=...         ruta, ruta-cached, fastroute, fastroute-cached,
                       symfony, symfony-compiled (default: all)
--iterations=20000     dispatches per measurement
--repeats=7            measurements per cell (median reported)
--warmup=2000          warmup dispatches before measuring

What is measured

Route sets are generated deterministically, so every router and every run sees exactly the same routes and requests. Two shapes are generated:

• rest — a typical versioned API: 6 routes per resource under /api/v1 (GET|POST /api/v1/{res}, GET|PUT|DELETE /api/v1/{res}/:id, GET /api/v1/{res}/:id/history), mixing static and dynamic segments.
• static — purely static three-segment documentation style routes.

Subjects (one column block per scenario, values are the median over the repeats):

subject	what it is
ruta	Ruta\Router, routes registered in memory
ruta (cached)	Ruta\cachedRouter() loading the route map from its cache file
fastroute	FastRoute\simpleDispatcher (GroupCountBased)
fastroute (cached)	FastRoute\cachedDispatcher loading from its cache file
symfony	Symfony\Component\Routing\Matcher\UrlMatcher over a RouteCollection
symfony (compiled)	CompiledUrlMatcher loading a dumped, compiled matcher from a file

Metrics:

• setup — time to get a dispatch-ready router: full route registration for the in-memory subjects, loading the warm cache file for the cached/compiled subjects. This is paid once per request in a classic PHP-FPM setup.
• dispatch scenarios — time per single dispatch, cycling over requests that hit the first, middle and last registered resource: a static path, a dynamic path (/api/v1/users/123), a deeper dynamic path (/api/v1/users/123/history) and misses (not found).

Fairness notes:

• All subjects route to plain string handler identifiers (no closures), since the cached subjects cannot serialize closures.
• One PSR-7 ServerRequest per request is pre-built outside the timed loops; ruta dispatches the request object, FastRoute/Symfony dispatch the method + path strings, which is how each library is used in practice.
• Symfony’s matcher signals a miss by throwing, so its not found numbers include the cost of throwing/catching — that is its real-world behaviour.
• Before measuring, every subject is verified to actually match the hit scenarios and miss the not-found scenarios.

Results

Run on PHP 8.4.19 (CLI, opcache off), Linux container, defaults (20000 iterations × 7 repeats, medians). Re-run locally for numbers on your hardware; relative ordering is what matters.

Shape rest — 60 routes (20000 iterations × 7 repeats, median)

router	setup µs	static (hit) µs/op	dynamic (hit) µs/op	dynamic deep (hit) µs/op	not found µs/op
ruta	65.8	1.17	1.55	1.64	1.13
ruta (cached)	35.4	1.16	1.64	1.64	1.18
fastroute	133	0.21	0.80	0.84	1.23
fastroute (cached)	55.8	0.22	0.82	0.86	1.27
symfony	79.5	6.88	8.26	9.21	11.8
symfony (compiled)	139	0.58	1.10	1.13	1.29

Shape rest — 600 routes (20000 iterations × 7 repeats, median)

router	setup µs	static (hit) µs/op	dynamic (hit) µs/op	dynamic deep (hit) µs/op	not found µs/op
ruta	660	1.84	2.29	2.40	2.37
ruta (cached)	269	1.67	2.15	2.19	2.28
fastroute	2,698	0.23	2.45	2.48	7.03
fastroute (cached)	530	0.24	2.45	2.49	7.15
symfony	883	53.7	55.0	55.8	99.3
symfony (compiled)	1,409	0.59	1.38	1.46	1.59

Shape rest — 1200 routes (20000 iterations × 7 repeats, median)

router	setup µs	static (hit) µs/op	dynamic (hit) µs/op	dynamic deep (hit) µs/op	not found µs/op
ruta	1,399	3.16	3.59	3.62	3.91
ruta (cached)	564	2.32	2.81	2.94	3.63
fastroute	8,526	0.22	4.31	4.35	14.0
fastroute (cached)	1,144	0.23	4.27	4.30	13.7
symfony	1,809	105	106	108	197
symfony (compiled)	2,970	0.57	1.69	1.69	1.88

Shape static — 60 routes (20000 iterations × 7 repeats, median)

router	setup µs	static (hit) µs/op	not found µs/op
ruta	57.5	1.20	1.06
ruta (cached)	25.3	1.17	1.06
fastroute	58.9	0.22	0.27
fastroute (cached)	24.5	0.23	0.28
symfony	77.8	7.22	11.0
symfony (compiled)	128	0.59	1.12

Shape static — 600 routes (20000 iterations × 7 repeats, median)

router	setup µs	static (hit) µs/op	not found µs/op
ruta	589	1.47	1.09
ruta (cached)	135	1.36	1.06
fastroute	638	0.21	0.27
fastroute (cached)	151	0.22	0.28
symfony	925	54.3	99.3
symfony (compiled)	1,490	0.60	1.19

Shape static — 1200 routes (20000 iterations × 7 repeats, median)

router	setup µs	static (hit) µs/op	not found µs/op
ruta	1,255	1.88	1.10
ruta (cached)	278	1.50	1.06
fastroute	1,353	0.21	0.27
fastroute (cached)	315	0.22	0.27
symfony	1,860	111	202
symfony (compiled)	3,039	0.60	1.13

Interpretation

• Dispatch: ruta’s segment-tree lookup depends on URI depth rather than on route count, so it degrades only mildly as the route set grows (≈1.2 µs at 60 routes to ≈3 µs at 1200 in the rest shape, ≈1.8 µs purely static). FastRoute is unbeatable on static hits (a flat ≈0.2 µs hash lookup at any size), but its dynamic matching and especially its misses degrade with route count: from 600 REST routes upward ruta dispatches dynamic hits about as fast or faster (2.3 µs vs 2.5 µs at 600; 3.6 µs vs 4.3 µs at 1200) and misses 3–4× faster (3.9 µs vs ~14 µs at 1200). Symfony’s non-compiled UrlMatcher degrades linearly and is 30–60× slower than everything else at scale; its compiled matcher is the strongest all-rounder on big route sets (≈0.6 µs static, ≈1.7 µs dynamic at 1200 routes).
• Setup: ruta has the cheapest cold registration of all subjects (1.4 ms for 1200 REST routes vs 1.8 ms for Symfony’s collection and 8.5 ms for FastRoute, whose regex compilation dominates). Caching pays off as the set grows: Ruta\cachedRouter() cuts setup roughly 2.5× at 600+ routes (660 µs → 269 µs, 1 399 µs → 564 µs). The Symfony compiled numbers include require-ing a large dumped file with opcache off; with opcache enabled (as in production) that include — and ruta’s cache include — is essentially free.
• Misses: ruta rejects unknown paths in ~1 µs flat on static sets — its cheapest operation — while FastRoute’s and Symfony’s miss cost grows with route count (Symfony also pays for an exception per miss).

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