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Load Balancer Comparison: C vs Go

A performance comparison project implementing the same HTTP load balancer in both C and Go, with comprehensive benchmarking tools to analyze their relative performance characteristics.

Project Structure

load-balancer-comparison/
├── C-LoadBalancer/          # C implementation with socket-based networking
├── Go-LoadBalancer/         # Go implementation using standard library
├── TestBackend/             # Simple HTTP backend servers for testing
└── scripts/                 # Automation and comparison utilities

Features

Both load balancers implement:

  • Round-robin load balancing
  • Health checking of backend servers
  • HTTP request forwarding
  • Connection pooling
  • Basic metrics collection

Benchmarking includes:

  • Concurrent request handling
  • Latency measurements (p50, p95, p99)
  • Throughput comparison
  • Memory usage analysis
  • CPU utilization tracking

Quick Start

# Build everything
make build

# Start test backend servers
cd TestBackend && ./start-backends.sh

# Run C load balancer
make run-c
# OR manually: ./bin/C-LoadBalancer

# Run Go load balancer  
make run-go
# OR manually: ./bin/Go-LoadBalancer

# Run test backend
make run-backend
# OR manually: ./bin/TestBackend

# Run benchmarks
make benchmark

Benchmark Results

Results are automatically generated in benchmarks/results/ with comparison charts showing:

  • Requests per second
  • Response time percentiles
  • Memory usage over time
  • CPU utilization

Goals

This project explores the practical performance differences between C and Go for network-intensive applications, providing real-world data on:

  • Raw performance characteristics
  • Development complexity trade-offs
  • Memory efficiency
  • Concurrency handling approaches