Performance Benchmarks

tileserver-rs is designed for high-performance tile serving. This page documents benchmark results for PMTiles, MBTiles, PostgreSQL, and Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) sources.

Test Environment

• Hardware: Apple Silicon (M-series) MacBook
• Runtime: All servers running in Docker containers (ARM64 native)
• Test Tool: autocannon (Node.js HTTP benchmarking)
• Configuration: 100 concurrent connections, 10 seconds per endpoint

Test Data

Summary Results

Both formats deliver ~93 MB/s throughput with 1,000+ requests/second under heavy load (100 concurrent connections).

Detailed Results by Zoom Level

PMTiles (Florence, Italy)

MBTiles (Zurich, Switzerland)

Analysis

Key Insights

• Throughput is consistent at ~90-100 MB/s regardless of zoom level
• Latency scales with tile size - low zoom (large tiles) = higher latency
• High zoom requests are fastest - z10-z14 achieve 1,000-3,400 req/s

PMTiles Performance

• Consistent performance across zoom levels
• Best at city zoom (z12-z14): 1,600+ req/s with 62ms latency
• Memory-mapped file access provides predictable performance

MBTiles Performance

• Fastest at z0: 3,441 req/s with only 29ms latency
• SQLite overhead more visible at high-detail tiles (z14: 425ms)
• Good for local development and smaller datasets

Format Comparison

Running Benchmarks

To reproduce these benchmarks with fair Docker-to-Docker comparison:

# Build tileserver-rs Docker image for your platform
docker build -t tileserver-rs:local .

# Update benchmarks/docker-compose.yml to use local image
# Then start all servers
docker compose -f benchmarks/docker-compose.yml up -d

# Run benchmarks
cd benchmarks
bun install
node run-benchmarks.js --duration 10 --connections 100

Benchmark Options

# Test only PMTiles
node run-benchmarks.js --format pmtiles

# Test only MBTiles  
node run-benchmarks.js --format mbtiles

# Test PostgreSQL table sources
node run-benchmarks.js --format postgres

# Test PostgreSQL function sources
node run-benchmarks.js --format postgres_function

# Test COG/raster sources
node run-benchmarks.js --format cog --connections 10

# Test specific server
node run-benchmarks.js --server tileserver-rs

# Longer test with more connections
node run-benchmarks.js --duration 30 --connections 200

# Generate markdown report
node run-benchmarks.js --markdown

Server Comparison

We benchmarked tileserver-rs against martin and tileserver-gl using the same test data. All servers ran in Docker containers on ARM64 for a fair apples-to-apples comparison.

PMTiles Performance (Florence, Italy)

tileserver-rs is ~20% faster than tileserver-gl and ~17x faster than martin for PMTiles serving.

MBTiles Performance (Zurich, Switzerland)

All three servers perform similarly for MBTiles (within ~5% of each other).

PostgreSQL Performance (Zurich Points)

Benchmarks run in isolation (fresh DB for each server) to ensure fair comparison.

tileserver-rs matches martin's PostgreSQL performance with connection pool pre-warming and prepared statement caching. Both servers show similar throughput at ~270 MB/s.

PostgreSQL by Zoom Level (tileserver-rs vs martin)

PostgreSQL Optimizations

tileserver-rs includes several PostgreSQL performance optimizations:

• Connection pool pre-warming - All connections established at startup
• Prepared statement caching - Tile queries pre-prepared on all connections
• ST_TileEnvelope margin - PostGIS 3.1+ margin parameter for better tile edge clipping
• SRID-aware envelope transformation - Transform tile envelope to table SRID instead of every geometry
• Moka-based tile cache - LRU cache with configurable size and TTL

Feature Comparison

tileserver-rs provides the best balance: fastest PMTiles performance (~20% faster than tileserver-gl, 17x faster than martin), competitive PostgreSQL performance (matches martin), native MapLibre rendering for raster tiles, static image generation - all in a single binary.

COG/Raster Performance

tileserver-rs supports Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) serving with on-the-fly reprojection and PNG encoding via GDAL.

Test Configuration

• COG File: 4096x4096 RGB image in Web Mercator (EPSG:3857)
• Connections: 10 concurrent (COG processing is CPU-intensive)
• Output: 256x256 PNG tiles

COG Benchmark Results (tileserver-rs)

Key Observations

• Latency scales with tile complexity - Lower zoom levels read more data from the COG
• Higher zoom = faster - z3+ tiles achieve 38+ req/s with sub-300ms latency
• CPU-bound - COG processing (GDAL read + PNG encode) limits throughput
• LZW compression - The benchmark COG uses LZW compression; uncompressed COGs are faster

Running COG Benchmarks

# Test COG performance only
node run-benchmarks.js --format cog --connections 10

# Compare with TiTiler (Python COG server)
docker compose -f benchmarks/docker-compose.yml up -d titiler tileserver-rs
node run-benchmarks.js --format cog --server tileserver-rs
node run-benchmarks.js --format cog --server titiler

TiTiler Comparison

The benchmark suite includes TiTiler for COG comparison:

Run docker compose -f benchmarks/docker-compose.yml up -d to start both servers for comparison.

Optimization Tips

1. Use release builds - cargo build --release is 10-50x faster than debug
2. Use PMTiles for production - cloud-native, HTTP range request friendly
3. Use MBTiles for development - easy to generate and inspect with SQLite tools
4. Enable compression - gzipped tiles reduce bandwidth significantly
5. Use CDN caching - tiles are immutable, cache with long TTLs
6. Match connections to cores - more connections than CPU cores adds overhead
7. For COG serving - use internal tiling and overviews for faster access