Bandit is an HTTP server for Plug and WebSock apps.
Bandit is written entirely in Elixir and is built atop Thousand Island. It can serve HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2 and WebSocket clients over both HTTP and HTTPS. It is written with correctness, clarity & performance as fundamental goals.
In ongoing automated performance tests, Bandit’s HTTP/1.x engine is up to 4x faster than Cowboy depending on the number of concurrent requests. When comparing HTTP/2 performance, Bandit is up to 1.5x faster than Cowboy. This is possible because Bandit has been built from the ground up for use with Plug applications; this focus pays dividends in both performance and also in the approachability of the code base.
Bandit also emphasizes correctness. Its HTTP/2 implementation scores 100% on the h2spec suite in strict mode, and its WebSocket implementation scores 100% on the Autobahn test suite, both of which run as part of Bandit’s comprehensive CI suite. Extensive unit test, credo, dialyzer, and performance regression test coverage round out a test suite that ensures that Bandit is and will remain a platform you can count on.
Lastly, Bandit exists to demystify the lower layers of infrastructure code. In a world where The New Thing is nearly always adding abstraction on top of abstraction, it’s important to have foundational work that is approachable & understandable by users above it in the stack.
Implement comprehensive support for HTTP/1.0 through HTTP/2 & WebSockets (and beyond) backed by obsessive RFC literacy and automated conformance testing
Aim for minimal internal policy and HTTP-level configuration. Delegate to Plug & WebSock as much as possible, and only interpret requests to the extent necessary to safely manage a connection & fulfill the requirements of safely supporting protocol correctness
Prioritize (in order): correctness, clarity, performance. Seek to remove the mystery of infrastructure code by being approachable and easy to understand
Along with our companion library Thousand Island, become the go-to HTTP & low-level networking stack of choice for the Elixir community by being reliable, efficient, and approachable
After several years of effort, I just published version 1.0.0 of both the Bandit and Thousand Island libraries. Folks that are depending on versions in the 0.x.y or 1.0.0-pre series of either library should update your dependencies to be ~> 1.0.
This has been a ton of work, and has been made possible in large part due to the help of tons of contributors. In particular, @moogle19, @ryanwinchester and @alisinabh have gone above and beyond on all fronts. The project wouldn’t be the success it is without help from folks like them. Thanks all!
I put together a bit of a retrospective blog post about the whole journey here, if anyone cares to learn more!
I have tried bandit only once. There was some simple bug, but it was hard to debug. For some reason my instinct suddenly directed me to this library. What’s funny I read about it only once before and I simply forgot its name, but somehow I have managed to find it on forum.
Anyway, bandit’s error handling was an amazing help which saved me a lot of energy and time. Been waiting for a stable 1.x release, so I could use it by default. Thanks!
Awesome effort! And I‘ll definitely upgrade to it right away! Thank you so much!
But one question I have still: what are the typical performance improvements one can expect with an ordinary liveview app? I have no good estimate how much time per route is spent in the http layer vs other parts of the pipeline. Anyone ideas?
Excellent question and one I get a lot. The short answer is that in most cases you probably won’t see much of a difference between Bandit and Cowboy from a performance perspective; your plug’s implementation is going to be the dominant factor in overall performance, and switching out the underlying server won’t magically make that work go away.
That having been said, there are many workloads in which you could expect to see a benefit to Bandit. The ideal case would be large numbers of HTTP/1 clients doing lots of IO on very short lived connections. In that case you could see some substantial benefits (see my latest benchmark for more).
Some workloads are going to be worse. In particular, HTTP/2 performance in Bandit is pretty awful at the moment, but is going to be getting a lot of attention as part of the work to add WebSockets over HTTP/2 (RFC 8441) support. This will be one of the next things I’m working on.
In terms of LiveView, Bandit’s WebSocket implementation is generally a little bit faster than Cowboy’s (around 10-20%). You might see some real-world benefit there; it really depends on your particular usage patterns.
