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