State of API Performance
Latency benchmarks, error rate patterns, and performance insights across web frameworks.
Last updated: March 2026
API Latency by Framework
Median (P50), P95, and P99 response times for common web frameworks handling typical CRUD API workloads.
Key Takeaways
- Gin (Go) and Fastify (Node.js) lead with sub-10ms P50 latencies
- P99 latency is 3-8x higher than P50 across all frameworks
- Django and Rails show the widest P50-to-P99 gap due to ORM query variance
Error Rates by Framework
Percentage of API requests resulting in 5xx errors, averaged across production applications.
Top Performance Bottlenecks
The most common causes of high latency identified in distributed traces, ranked by frequency.
| Rank | Bottleneck | Frequency | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
Database Query Latency Patterns
Average latency contribution of database operations in traced API requests.
Time Spent in DB (pct of total request)
N+1 Query Detection
Methodology
This report aggregates anonymized performance data from production applications monitored by TraceKit, supplemented with publicly available benchmark data from framework maintainers and the OpenTelemetry community. All data is anonymized and aggregated.
See where your APIs stand
Get latency percentiles, error rates, and bottleneck detection for your production APIs.
Related Resources
Setup guides for Gin, Express, Django, Spring Boot, and more
Paste and visualize your trace data as a waterfall or flame graph
Complete guide to distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry
How to debug latency issues without redeploying