Inquiry about Replacing net/http with fasthttp as HTTP/1.1 Backend Proxy in Traefik

Traefik Traefik v3 (latest)
1

In our production environment using Traefik v3.1.1, we have observed occasional DNS resolution timeouts (error: dial tcp: lookup internal domain name: i/o timeout), which occur more frequently in environments with poor network connectivity and happen almost daily.

We understand that net/http performs DNS resolution for each new HTTP connection (without DNS caching), so network fluctuations may cause DNS resolution timeouts. However, network issues are often challenging to troubleshoot.

We noticed that fasthttp supports DNS caching, and according to official fasthttp test data, it is significantly faster than net/http. This seems like a potential solution for our scenario.

We also noted that the official PR at Introduce a fast proxy mode to improve HTTP/1.1 performances with backends by kevinpollet · Pull Request #11122 · traefik/traefik · GitHub introduced fasthttp. We would like to inquire whether the Traefik team has conducted load testing for this change, what performance improvements have been observed for HTTP/1.1 proxy scenarios compared to net/http after adopting fasthttp, and whether specific load testing data is available for reference.

2

You mentioned the pull request, it seems merged. According to code you just need to enable it (ref). Make sure to use the latest version of Traefik v3.

3

I noticed that this feature is currently experimental and not recommended for production use. After reviewing the code, it seems that the current implementation of fasthttp lacks logic related to monitoring and call tracing.

The questions I'd like to clarify are as follows:

  1. What are the community's future plans for fasthttp, and when is it expected to become a stable feature?
  2. Approximately how much performance improvement can be achieved by using fasthttp currently?
  3. Have the features related to fasthttp call tracing and monitoring been implemented yet?
4

If you want dev feedback, you need to go to Github. Here it’s mostly just Traefik users.