Benchmarks

The @kafkats/benchmark package runs throughput benchmarks comparing @kafkats/client against KafkaJS.

Running

Benchmarks use a persistent Docker Compose Kafka cluster. Start it once:

# If running from a devcontainer:
KAFKA_ADVERTISED_HOST=host.docker.internal docker compose -f packages/benchmark/docker-compose.yml up -d

# If running directly on the host:
# KAFKA_ADVERTISED_HOST=localhost docker compose -f packages/benchmark/docker-compose.yml up -d

Then run the benchmarks:

KAFKA_BROKERS=host.docker.internal:19292,host.docker.internal:19293,host.docker.internal:19294 pnpm -C packages/benchmark bench:producer -- --iterations 10 --warmup 2
KAFKA_BROKERS=host.docker.internal:19292,host.docker.internal:19293,host.docker.internal:19294 pnpm -C packages/benchmark bench:consumer -- --iterations 10 --warmup 2

Sample Results

These results were collected with:

• Kafka cluster: 3 brokers via packages/benchmark/docker-compose.yml
• Payload: 10,000 messages, 1 KB message size
• Producer batch size: 100
• Iterations: 10 (+2 warmup)

Producer

Library	Mean throughput
@kafkats/client	39,545 msg/s
kafkajs	22,333 msg/s
@platformatic/kafka	37,636 msg/s

@kafkats/client vs KafkaJS: 1.77x mean throughput.

Consumer

Library	Mean throughput
@kafkats/client	107,075 msg/s
kafkajs	62,666 msg/s
@platformatic/kafka	73,124 msg/s

@kafkats/client vs KafkaJS: 1.71x mean throughput.

Notes

Absolute numbers vary by hardware, Docker/VM networking, and tuning. For reproducible comparisons, run the suite on your target environment and compare ratios rather than raw msg/s.