HttpArena
Knowledge Base

Infrastructure Entry Rules

Infrastructure entries (type: infrastructure) are reverse proxies and static-file servers - nginx, Caddy, h2o and the like - run without an application framework layer. Like engines, they are not frameworks and are ranked separately.

What qualifies

  • Reverse proxies terminating TLS and forwarding upstream (nginx, Caddy, h2o)
  • Standalone static-file servers
  • Edge servers used purely as a proxy in front of an application

Something that embeds one of these servers but ships application code on top of it is a framework entry, not an infrastructure one - openresty, ngx-php and frankenphp are ranked with the frameworks.

Rules

  • Must implement the endpoint spec correctly and pass the validation suite
  • No restrictions on configuration
  • Ranked separately from framework entries: its own composite, its own normalization pool
  • A handler module written specifically for the benchmark is allowed - that is how a server without an application layer answers /baseline11 and /json at all - but it must be a module loaded by the server, not a replacement for it

Scored profiles

Infrastructure is scored on the eleven profiles a server can answer without an application framework behind it:

CategoryProfiles
ConnectionBaseline, Pipelined, Short-lived
WorkloadJSON, JSON TLS, Static, Static TLS
HTTP/2Baseline, Static
HTTP/3Baseline, Static

Everything else - upload, the database and CRUD profiles, the API mixes, gRPC, WebSocket and the gateway stacks - is displayed as reference data where an entry has it, but does not count toward the infrastructure composite.

Pipelined is the one profile scored here and nowhere else. It stopped counting for frameworks in #1058 because it measures batching behaviour more than framework throughput; for a proxy that behaviour is the thing being compared, so it stays in.